Anita Cheng

Farewell 18F

2025-03-01T00:00:00Z

18F was my dream org. I first learned about it while considering UX back around 2014. I literally bookmarked the website into my “aspirational” folder.

I’m glad I made it in before it got wiped off the face of the earth tonight.

My first week there, I had a virtual coffee with the Chief of Staff, who told me that “18F doesn’t ship software, it ships culture.” Being new, I didn’t quite understand.

But now, at the end, I do.

The relationships I have built, the collaborative nature of everyone I met, the relentless drive to just make things better...you can’t destroy that.

We’ll just grow little 18Fs wherever we end up.

No matter what happens next, I feel heartened that we’re still supporting each other. Having had my world torn out from under my feet already with my mom’s death 6 years ago, knowing that people have your back is what helps the most to move forward.

By mid-day March 1, we’d already mobilized and launched 18f.org to tell our story. Like the tagline says, “we’re not done yet.” Although as someone pointed out later, it really means we actually don’t know how to stop! 😅

I also found this in my collection. Someone had given it to me at the last 18F “IRL” (aka offsite) in DC in 2023. Figured this would happen to me. I posted it on Instagram because of course I did.

Poetic, or a cosmic joke? Probably both.

Code for America Summit 2024, Day 2

2024-05-30T00:00:00Z

How cities around the world are scaling digital transformation (main stage)

Original thread on Mastodon

Made it back to CFASummit day 2 just in time to see another former teammate from SF Digital Services, Mai-Ling Garcia talk about cities and scaling digital transformation. It really depends on the size of the city. It’s important to look at the 360 view of the users. Iceland also uses dimensions of equality to look at their services.

Playing fangirl for Mai-Ling!

Mai-Ling says it’s important not only to have techies in government, but experienced public servants also in the tech companies. They’re the ones building the tech that has such huge impact on everyone.

Arna Saevarsdottir from the city of Reykjavik in Iceland, says that support from elected leaders is crucial. Santiago Amador from Bogotá says the leaders must be able to adapt. Mai-Ling emphasizes how important it is to have leaders who can support each phase of the city’s design maturation model.

Automating access: Better government services for all (main stage)

Original thread on Mastodon

Next on the CFASummit main stage is Code for America staff Alia Toran-Burrell, Colleen Burns, and Tracey Patterson to talk about using automation to improve government services.

Alia says automation helps the user, especially clearing criminal records which was such a burden, most people never got through it. But it still takes work for government: reading through thousands of pieces data, deduping data, then actually going into the database to clear the records.

Automating Medicaid renewals helped bring down application time from 70 minutes to 11. They already have to use data they already have to help process, but automation helps make it faster.

But when we automate, we have to be careful about codifying inequities, like stripping away formatting (accents and hyphens) in names, which mostly affects kids of color.

Automation also can’t solve all the problems. Legislating away burdens like requirements to pay fines/fees associated with a criminal record will still be easier than automation. PA has done it!

Procurement for the people (main stage)

Original thread on Mastodon

Next on the CFA Summit main stage is Michael Owh from the County of Los Angeles to talk about procurement! He says he’ll turn us all into procurement nerds, heh. He started out in law, but saw how procurement was blocking motivated public servants from doing their jobs. Procurement rules were made to prevent bad things from happening, but also stopped good work from happening.

To streamline the procurement process for a quick turnaround, they limited proposal questions, collaborated with providers, and made it all happen during a school summer break—just in time for help 100k NYC middle schoolers get after school programs!

People are cheering for Michael Owh’s insistence that we use plain language in proposals and give them information up front.

“Don’t be the plumber who looks for the leak, we have to look at the whole system [in case we’re missing gutters!]” Make procurement for the people!

Public benefits for the public benefit—Fulfilling the promise together (main stage)

Original thread on Mastodon

Rachel Korberg from the Families and Workers Fund announces from the CFA Summit $45 million in grant support to help people get benefits.

Jilma Meneses from WA Dept of Social and Health Service says they’re working on an integrated eligibility system, not for just one program, but all of the benefits with one front door. The goal is to get people options instantly.

Porschia Davis from mRelief says text-based services helps meet people where they are, allowing millions to access benefits they might not have access to.

Poschia gets cheers for her future vision, where she says benefits programs should be opt out, not opt in. Other countries do this, getting people benefits in less time.

Jilma also talks about economic justice, how it will help everybody.

Making tax filing free and easy with Direct File (main stage)

Original thread on Mastodon

Lastly on the CFA Summit main stage is a panel from people working on IRS Direct File, which was just announced as a permanent free tax-filing option for all 50 states starting next tax season!

Courtney O’Reilly from Code for America talks about how impressive it is how much the Direct File pilot was able to achieve in its first year, especially how it centered low-income users.

Merici Vinton from US Digital Service talks about how important it is that most filers trusted the IRS more after using Direct File. It was a multi-agency initiative that centered around the user. Accessibility was everyone’s responsibility. Constant feedback allowed them to do fixes in real-time, starting with just one person, and building from there.

Bridget Roberts from the IRS talks about how they’ll need to work more with states for the next year, about how their pilot state partners were so collaborative. Code for America partnered with AZ and NY states to bring them onboard to Direct File, and file their state taxes at the same time! They’ll expand this effort to more states next year.

Connecting existing data from online data reduce rejected filings by 25%. Look out for more updates on Direct File in the future!

There’s red tape, and then there’s invisible tape: Identifying hidden barriers to change (breakout)

Original thread on Mastodon

At the CFA Summit breakout about invisible tape from the State of Utah, who were building out infrastructure to get feedback from constituents about…everything! They measured task completion, satisfaction, effort, empathy, reliability, and comments.

The comments are often juicy qualitative data that often has a lot of feelings!

Interactive sticky note session about obstacles to change we’ve seen, woooo!

Some of these are too real 😅:

“What about PRA?” (Only feds know this one LOL…)
“The vendor can’t do it”
“It goes against State code (but actually wasn’t!)”
“That’s above my pay grade”
“Are we being sued over it?”

Each excuse is an assumption. Our job is to name and then test that assumption!

It’s hard though, since rejection hurts! Change hurts too, and we all have to work through it.

To break through blockers, find the owner of the thing and tell them what you learned. Often, it takes just one person in a position of power to actually make things happen!

Add detail to your picture of the problem. Make the solution actionable and easier to grasp, it feels so much closer to build it.

You can also list out the stakeholders and meet with them. Get a group behind you, especially if they’re the ones making the decisions!

Calculate how valuable the problem is. If you fixed something, how much would say, call volume be reduced? Even a back-of-the-napkin calculation can help!

Bringing digital delivery capacity to federal policy leaders (breakout)

Original thread on Mastodon

Last CFA Summit breakout is getting an update on bringing digital delivery capacity to federal policy leaders. Digital delivery folks were at the table where policy was created and implemented, so how’s it going?

Digital delivery roles were created from scratch. Needed to figure out where to provide value! Rebecca Piazza at USDA Food and Nutrition Service talks about making things “stick” and reinforcing that “stickiness” (and truly owning their mission) as opposed to the consulting model of 18F.

Rebecca emphasizes that implementation is still important—you have to work as upstream as possible to make sure things go smoothly!

Pooja Shaw at the White House finds herself being “translator” a lot, going in between policy and technology to build up capacity at every level of government. Make sure everyone’s talking to each other!

Lynn Overmann at Beeck Center for Social Impact (but formerly at USDA and the White House) talks about how she used to identify problems but not have a team behind her to fix anything. You have to have delivery teams to actually get things done.

Rebecca talks about how program integrity issues can also be customer experience issues. When a SNAP recipient moves states, they have to disenroll in their old state and sign up anew in the new state so they don’t get SNAP benefits twice. Many people try to do the right thing, but if it’s too hard, they can just give up! So it was an opportunity to make it easier for people as well as improving the program integrity.

While making it easier to disenroll from SNAP, the 18F team also questioned why certain data was collected. “The best way to secure data is to never collect it at all!” Might as well start from the source.

Pooja talks about how we still have a long way to go in making policies work during implementation. Had to write a memo to very senior leaders in government about the data categories they needed to use, which probably should have been hashed out at the policy level…. 😅

When working at the policy and implementation level, you have to make sure you’re talking with people who have real authority.

Pooja points out that you have to look at the incentives to have agencies collaborate instead of fracture apart. Lynn says you have to show, don’t tell, if you’re proposing change. For state-run federal programs like SNAP or WIC, what are plays that the states can do that maybe don’t require the feds?

When passing suggestions to policy folks, Pooja has seen that presenting user-informed research to an open-minded partner can be convincing. Lynn points out many of them have never done user-centered research and talked to people first-hand. They just don’t have the information. “Don’t let lawyers bamboozle you!” Finding a lawyer who will say yes is so valuable.

To get stuff done, Rebecca says you have to build the relationships, especially with career staff. How can your efforts further their interests? What motivates them? They can help you get stuff through if things get hard. And when the project is done, the relationships can still be nurtured to further culture change!

Lynn says sometimes you need to bring in a powerful person to get stuff through! That will give you the opportunity to deliver something and prove yourself to the naysayers, even if they’re mad at first. But you need that opportunity.

Rebecca says you have to identify the policy levers you have available to you—regulations can take 2 years, guidance can take a year, legislation can take the whole term! How many of them can you reasonably use?

Code for America Summit 2024, Day 1

2024-05-29T00:00:00Z

Why states care more about customer experience than ever before (main stage)

Original thread on Mastodon

At CFA Summit and snuck up to the first few rows where there are actually seats, vs the standing-room only in the back. 😅

The view from the third row.

Re: states being at the forefront of government services, “you gotta be where the people are.” Even more true during COVID!

MN has a North Star of being the best place to raise a child. They’re thinking digital-first to get all the services together.

When working in government services, everyone has to be all-in on customer service. “Listen for the “they’s” when trying to break through red tape and talk through ways of working to get past it.

At State level, it’s so important to get from policy to solution quickly, because that means a family gets to put food on the table. You have to build quickly but also sustainably.

If you encounter a constraint, look into whether the constraint can be removed. “Can we move that fence back so we don’t keep hitting it?” Book rec: “Hack your Bureaucracy” by Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai.

Breaking barriers by building accessible digital services (main stage)

Original thread on Mastodon

Cassie Winters from OMB is up at the CFA Summit main stage to talk about digital accessibility. 1 in 4 adults in the US live with a disability. But 48% of popular Federal websites have accessibility errors. And there are 60 accessibility errors per page across the top 1 million websites. We have a lot of work to do!

OMB has Digital Accessibility Guidance, but they’re still just words on a page. But people who work in government services hold the key to making services accessible. Do usability tests, validate accessibility vendor work through good procurement, and cultivate a workplace culture where accessibility is paramount.

Bonus of sitting up close—being able to access QR codes on slides!

Exploring AI insights across civic tech (main stage)

Original thread on Mastodon

The big bugaboo in government (and CFA Summit) now is AI. Justin Brown of Center of Public Sector AI says we have to build foundations for AI. Together, we have to set a foundation of ethical, outcome-driven cultures and values.

Traci Walker of the Digital Services Coalition says we need to have more convos with trusted partners and doing more market research before just procuring anything that says “AI.” The AI landscape is full of snake oil salespeople right now!

We can also leverage AI during the procurement process—can AI augment staff capabilities?

You also need good data to have good AI. So any AI-related procurement needs sections about good data too.

Jonathan Porat, CTO of CA State, says to build experimentation into any AI work and test test test!

Sanmi Koyej of Stanford says humans make decisions slowly, but AI tech can make decisions quickly, and “reflects back to us what we are.”

Government should actually engage with AI to demystify it and make it human-centered to augment human capabilities instead of replacing people (which he thinks is problematic). We should also build measurement tools to see which tools are good and which ones are bad, so expectations match reality.

In CA, the teams managing the oldest systems (like UNIX), are now also managing AI projects and platforms. The old guard can do cutting edge work too!

When understanding AI ethics, Traci thinks soft skills will be even more important than the tech itself. We can also open up data and information for education using AI.

Human-centered marketing and communication to drive service uptake (main stage)

Original thread on Mastodon

Katie Fiore of NJ’s Office of Innovation talks about marketing government services. The way that most governments talk about their services is antithetical to people’s actual concerns: “Nobody cares!” (Personal note: AMEN!!!!! 🙌)

You have to meet people where they are. When people drop out of college, they aren’t just demotivated, but research also showed they were grieving. Writing marketing toward that helped uptake by more than 100%.

And NJ Office of Innovation has a marketing playbook!

Kara Swisher receives CfA’s Legacy Achievement Award (main stage)

Original thread on Mastodon

LOL Kara Swisher says “I could kill a techie [or] small poodle” with her award. And reminds us that we “bought and paid for the internet” so it should help us, we shouldn’t be beholden to it.

(And also reminds us that she’s still working even though she’s been getting all these lifetime achievement awards. “I might die with Elon Musk on Mars, in 2045…only one of us will make it, and it won’t be him!”)

“It will be the people doing malevolent things with AI who will kill us. Focus on humanity a little more, and less on the technology.” So important to develop a democratic way of creating technology. “Virtuality is taking over reality.” Let’s not be blind to everything that’s happening.

Fireside chat about AI (main stage)

Original thread on Mastodon

Last fireside chat on the CFA Summit main stage this morning is with Dr. Safiya Noble and Khari Johnson.

At first, people thought code was neutral because “it’s just math” but Safiya’s book “Algorithms of Oppression” looked into the results of keyword searches. Asian and Black women were associated with pornography in search engines. People said “that’s what people are searching for” but is that what Asian and Black women are searching for? (We’re people too!)

Government has to be the guardrails for runaway tech, although we don’t have good enforcement mechanisms right now. Maybe the FTC. There has been a lot of deregulation happening, with lots of tax breaks going to some of the largest, most powerful companies in the world. Government needs to hold companies accountable. And Gen Z is not having it, so we might recoup some losses there.

Dr. Safiya Noble is really concerned about AI’s effect on the environment. One recent finding was that one prompt into a generative AI system is the equivalent of pouring 5 cups of water onto the ground. She thinks we’ll look back and say it’s not worth it.

If we’re going to use AI, we should use it to solve real problems, like weather patterns and planned migration. Nobody really wants to talk to an AI when they call their bank!

Dr. Safiya Noble talks about an easy-to-read white paper from the UK government about AI—procurement was a huge part of it. (I THINK it’s this white paper.)

More tech isn’t going to solve all the problems. What we input into tech system can follow us through our lives. We need to work with each other and with systems, and not just rely on technology.

Dr. Safiya Noble hopes that we can embrace our better selves and not go to the worst. She says New Zealand writes policies where the earth is a stakeholder, and how it must stand for 70 years. How can we think long term and not just short term?

Making lemonade: When well-intentioned legislation is at odds with user needs (breakout)

Original thread on Mastodon

At the CFA Summit breakout session with Victoria Kidd from Bloom Works and Abigail Fisher from Colorado Digital Service.

Colorado needed to track “beds” for behavioral health services. They interviewed providers on “bed” definitions, their current data inputting experience, and what data they would need to understand to use a bed tracking system. They needed this info to develop a usable bed-tracking solution.

One key insight: Bed tracking alone won’t improve care navigation. It’s not just about beds, but “getting appropriate care to facilitate healing.”

They made a journey map to visualize how CO has an inconsistent system that’s built on…faxes. But you can’t filter with faxes, and you don’t even know if your fax has been seen. You can’t work with data that way.

Second key insight: Providers don’t see the benefits of all their reporting efforts. When staffing is reduced, they’re focused on keeping their doors open, not inputting data to the state! This is an administrative burden crisis.

Third key insight: Reporting requirements don’t fit into provider workflows. Providers need the data to be real-time to be useful! The new system needed to be built to talk to existing systems (APIs!), or find some way to reimburse providers for the extra manual inputting work.

Following legislative parameters was already like threading a needle, but adding reality to it became like threading an even smaller needle! To work with this, they had to pinpoint the spirit of the legislation. Engaging leadership in a phased approach to build clinical+provider-focused features on top of the tracking data.

Another strategy was to balance burden and benefit for the providers. You have to give back when you ask something of someone, especially an overly burdened provider! They proposed creating a provider directory to support care navigation with the bed tracking.

The last strategy was to build for standardization. They encouraged leadership to move beyond 1 law = 1 tech system. They looked at international standards like Open Referrals so they could build in more capacity later.

The thread they chose: not building a “bed tracker” at all, but building in the capability to collect bed data along with a provider directory to make it all actionable and integrated into the care navigation journey.

This pivot required socialization and trust, identifying beliefs central to the misalignment.

The legislation assumed that the standalone bed tracker WOULD improve care in CO state, so they had to help everyone release that assumption. They had to break mental models, especially since the idea of “bed tracking” had been around for a long time! Better to integrate into a cohesive system.

To socialize the new idea, you have to get people involved! Find out where they got to where they are so you can work with them to move forward. This requires time! It helped that the research was done in phases.

Socializing new ideas also requires having hard conversations. You have to walk through the legislative ideals from all points of view (state needs vs provider needs) so you can see the discrepancies and talk through them. You have to get the right people in the room at the right time, and keep each other updated on the convos that are happening.

Victoria and Abigail remind us that these hard conversations are HARD. They felt AWFUL when they were happening, but slowly, people’s minds started changing.

And they’re launching Client Care Search this week!!!!

🔥 insight from the Q&A: Another assumption from the legislation is that there are enough beds in CO, you just need to find them. But that’s not true—there’s just not enough beds! Or sometimes there’s not enough staff, because even if you have a bed, it can’t be used if there isn’t staff to support the patient! This is where data can be used in legislation—finding out how reality works. (Personal note: this is how I feel about affordable housing…)

When working with stakeholders on this pivoted solution, they emphasized that they were working in phases. So it wasn’t a “no,” they’d simply be doing the thing later.

Delivering more value by democratizing research with care (breakout)

Original thread on Mastodon

Cheering on my former SF Digital Services team members for the following CFA Summit breakouts! Currently it’s Nadine Levin and Jennifer Ng about democratizing research.

Many researchers who fled academia can be defensive about their research space, but lack of resources often result in non-researchers doing research. But is this a good thing?

Several questions that come up when democratizing research: What IS research? Does rigor and quality matter? What counts as relevant expertise?

In the research community, there are fears about job security and narrowing down to only tactical design research (assumed to be “safe” or “low-impact” which is not necessarily true!).

When you do/frame/present research poorly, there are risks to the project, the research practice, organization, and community.

When democratizing research, you also need to consider how to empower stakeholders in other ways, like asking why the org wants to research, and how research can help the org.

SFDS’s past model involved non-researchers doing all the research and having a third-party non-profit handle the recruitment, before Nadine and Jennifer looked to update the process.

Nadine and Jennifer’s backgrounds gave them a certain POV about research, coming from a large research team and being a research team of one, respectively.

Is “just talking to people (actually coworkers)” research? This might result in data bias—not hearing directly from users, and imprecise observations can be encoded as research. It can also be costly to do research when following best practices, using past research, and using metrics can suffice.

You have to encourage thoughtful decision-making, defining research while not discouraging stakeholders from talking to people.

The monthly rolling research model (with non-researchers using templates) resulted in lots of good data. But without an expert researcher to guide the synthesis, the findings were limited in impact and the conclusions were sometimes inaccurate. And there was pressure in “doing research” every month instead of focusing on impactful insights.

When Nadine and Jennifer joined the team, they redefined the researcher role to evaluate the research need. They also looked at how to involve stakeholders.

When doing research with marginalized communities (ex: monolingual speakers), you have to be sensitive to their needs for safety and comfort, and being aware of the power dynamics. Someone doing research could do real harm if they haven’t had training, like trauma-informed research.

For doing research with marginalized communities, Nadine and Jennifer created templates for participant reach out and discussion guides. And they had to talk it out with stakeholders, who were used to sending anyone who spoke Spanish out to do research with monolingual Spanish speakers.

When democratizing research, you have to understand the needs of your organization and staff. Is it about capacity building or transparency? For SFDS, it was about transparency and getting involved in the data collection.

While democratizing research, it’s important to demonstrate best research practices, for the team and for the stakeholders. You have to have those hard convos to build trust. This is especially important when talking about risk. Research considerations should be framed around risk.

You can empower stakeholders by having a researcher guide the team through messy data if a team lacks time to do research and there is lots of risk involved.

A researcher could also coach the team to do research, if they’re subject matter experts, to build research capacity on lower-risk work.

When Jennifer was a researcher guide, she checked in with stakeholders constantly, asked about their experience, and showed clips. That helped embody research practices before she wrote the report. It helped build in research thinking, but it took a long time—6 months full-time. Sometimes stakeholders would get to a knee-jerk insight from an observation, but Jennifer was there to guide them through it.

Nadine calls up SFDS project manager Amy Martin to talk about her experience getting coached on working on a qualitative survey! This also took a long time—more than 6 months—but really appreciated getting the support. The more Amy got into research, the more she realized what she didn’t know about research, but that’s ok if you expect that.

Nadine assures us that Amy is underselling the impact of her qualitative survey, and emphasizes the importance of doing rigorous, impactful research even if it takes more time. (She also now calls this “collaborative research” instead of “democratizing research.”)

From Q&A: In government, there isn’t an institutional review board like there is in academia. 😅 So that actually puts more responsibility on the researchers to ensure everything is done ethically and safely.

Attendee: “It sounds like you ARE the IRB!”
Nadine: “Yeah, but I don’t want to do that!”

From Q&A: When educating people about how feedback/surveys are not necessarily research, step back from the “how” and get to the “why.” It takes time, but you have to build that trust!

More than an afterthought: The necessity of training government workers on technology (breakout)

Original thread on Mastodon

In the front row again for a former SF Digital Services teammate, this time Amy Martin presenting with Caitlin Seifritz at City of Philadelphia about training non-techies in government! Fun fact: they are both former librarians and most importantly, both have small dogs!

In SF, they’ve worked website training from live webinars to self-paced, with direct access to the website. In Philly, they have limited access to the website system during training.

But in all government, there’s a gap between what traditional government workers and digital service teams know about technology. Not knowing how to connect the gap often causes projects to fail due to communication errors. Training is a way to bridge this gap and build relationships.

Amy and Caitlin wanted to know how other digital service teams did training, so they created a qualitative survey with 25 questions, that got 24 responses. “Qualitative” meaning it did not assess trends or compile numeric statistics, hoping to get deep with fewer responses. (It would have been really hard with hundreds of responses!)

Training survey findings!

Common training topics:

Plain language
Web accessibility
User-centered websites

General tips:

Interactivity
1:1 help as follow-up like office hours
Small-group cohorts
Having someone coordinating trainings from big-picture perspective

Both learners and digital service teams struggle to make training a priority. Everyone is busy and has limited capacity! But some orgs also didn’t prioritize the importance of the trainings and focus on real learning.

Very few teams are doing training evaluations! Teams didn’t want to put pressure on learners, but it’s hard to know if a learner actually learned anything. Plus, training alone doesn’t lead to culture change. You can teach people things, but if there’s no opportunities to use them, there’s still no impact.

Digital service teams are attempting to overcome the tech knowledge gap by training partners. But low investment keeps it from working. When the goal is reducing digital service team workload, the focus isn’t on the learner experience.

Expectations are training are high—digital service teams want training to change EVERYTHING. It doesn’t, “but we really want it to!” The incentives have to change too.

But we also don’t know what real training success looks like. The outcomes are unclear, so it’s hard to know what’s working and what’s not working.

You have to understand what training CAN’T do. It can’t lead to culture change, serve as the only solution, be one-size-fits-all, nor can it replace a full educational background and career. Find a happy medium where learners know why a skill is important, and how to apply it in their job. It may take more than one session!

There’s a lot of talk about hiring more techies from private sector to government, but it’s still important to train non-techies. We have to be able to trust each other and talk to each other! That helps us accept the work that we’re doing on both sides.

What training CAN do: build relationships, create advocates, empower learners, foster a culture of learning, inspire curiosity, and build incremental skills. Meet people where they are and inspire them to apply what they’ve learned.

Training recommendations

For leaders of digital service teams:

Standard practices for measuring (and using) learning outcomes
Open source curriculum package for plain language, service delivery, and user-centered design
Making the case toolkit to help teams get buy-in from leadership on HCD concepts on websites

Recommedations for trainers

Make it interactive, especially when you can make it relevant to them! When making small cohorts, try getting people to work together, connect learners after the training, and having a cohort from a single agency to work on a relevant project.

Caitlin did apologize for lecturing at us the whole time, but that’s why there are memes!

Consider having a formal training program instead of one-off lessons. Define goals, offer 1:1 help (office hours and labs), and create online documentation.

Make the commitment to have a training coordinator to set goals, track metrics, adjust trainings, and encourage iteration. “Things to glow on, and things to grow on.”

Amy notes that in tech, we expect people to come to office hours with accurately-formed questions. As a former librarian, she’s used to people asking vague unprepared questions—a reference desk model. Let’s try that when working with non-techies. Remind ourselves that “learning is inconvenient.”

In the Q&A, an attendee suggests not just calling it training, but move toward “training, learning, and adoption” so it’s built more into the org culture.

Amy and Caitlin also shared their slides because they are awesome!

Baby nap math calculator in Google Sheets

2024-05-16T00:00:00Z

I don’t know about anyone else, but I never had to think so much about schedules before having a baby. The only times I needed to pay attention to were meetings and events. And if it wasn’t on my calendar, it simply didn’t exist!

But for the first 6 months of my baby’s life, my life revolved around her sleep schedule.

The truth is that babies are a lot like grownups. They don’t sleep if they aren’t tired. The big difference is that babies will be very very angry if they’re expected to sleep and they’re not tired. And they can also get very very angry if they get too tired!

You see the quandary here? Woe to those who get their baby’s wake windows wrong!

There’s also a balance to strike with how much they nap during the day, and how much you expect them to sleep at night.

To get any semblance of predictability, you start to track when your baby wakes up, how long they sleep, and when the next nap should start. It’s a lot to do in your head, and I eventually got tired of it.

So I made a tool in Google Sheets to do the calculations for me!

What you need

A Google account, although you could also download this on Excel or Numbers if you really wanted. The bonus of using this on Google Sheets is that you could download the app and edit/refer to this on the go!
The ability to enter times in HH:MM format

That’s it!

The calculator

Click around the nap math calculator or make a copy in Google Sheets

Instructions

Enter the wake windows you want to try in column D, in HH:MM format. I recommend suggestions from the book Precious Little Sleep—not sponsored, just a huge fan!
Every morning, enter your baby’s wake time in cell B2, and night sleep time in cell E10.
Follow the suggested start times for naps. As you progress through the day, update the nap lengths in column E, in HH:MM format
When you drop a nap, zero out the values for wake windows and nap lengths in that nap row. You can then hide the rows.

Adjusting wake windows

Using the calculator makes it easy to track anything you want to change, especially wake windows.

From Precious Little Sleep, the general idea is that if your baby is waking in the middle of the night, you need to cut down on day sleep. And if they’re crying for more than 20 minutes at the start of the nap, it’s time to extend wake windows.

Though, keep in mind that timing is only one reason why your baby is not sleeping. All bets are off they aren’t already sleeping on their own, and if they’re still feeding at night. (It’s a big reason why I chose to sleep-train my baby. If she cried, I knew it was due to illness or needing a schedule change. Or she unzipped her sleep sack, haha.)

But having a good schedule is also a prerequisite if you do want to sleep-train your baby. After all, babies who are not tired don’t sleep. 😉 It’s a lot of experimentation, and every sleep is an opportunity to practice.

Graduating from doing nap math

It depends on your baby, but I found I didn’t need this calculator anymore after my baby went to 2 naps. The wake windows simply didn’t matter as much for her sleep experience. And then I was free from nap math forever!

Quick thoughts about the fractured UX community

2024-04-11T00:00:00Z

So, I’m not familiar with who’s on the UXPA board and what kind of experience they have organizing a community. But I wonder if the current state of the UX community as a whole can somewhat explain how they arrived at their current predicament.

I came up into UX by volunteering at orgs and conferences, but I feel like that’s not something people do anymore, even before COVID. There’s too many bootcamps and online courses to pursue instead. I don’t think people really look for communities now.

Whereas I feel that I actually gained most of my UX knowledge by connecting with more experienced folks. I wouldn’t say I had a singular mentor during my entire career, but I definitely had communities to lean on. And we can check in with each other about who is a true ally and supporter, and who is not.

UX is a skill set and a way of approaching problems, that can be learned on your own if you so choose. But the UX community is a whole other thing. Never discount the “people factor” in anything you do. And honestly, you’ll always do better UX work if you remember there are people involved.

Assigning an active page in Eleventy navigation

2024-02-03T00:00:00Z

The background

I’ve always believed it was good wayfinding practice to mark where a particular page was in the global navigation, visually as well as in the code. That way the site visitor has an idea of where they are, especially if they landed on a secondary page from a link or a search result.

This is easy enough to do when hand-coding. But it can get tricky when you’re rolling your own system that computes some things for you too! That was the situation with my Eleventy site.

Since I started from the Eleventy Duo theme, my global navigation links are contained in the global site.json as follows:

"headerLinks": [
    {
      "text": "Work",
      "url": "/work/",
      "external":false
    },
    {
      "text": "Writing",
      "url": "/writing/page-1/",
      "external": false
    },
    {
      "text": "Speaking",
      "url": "/speaking/",
      "external": false
    },
    {
      "text": "About",
      "url": "/about/",
      "external": false
    }
  ],

The Writing navigation item goes to the first page of my paginated post collection.

The theme then assigns an aria-current="page" in base.njk to any child pages as follows:

{% if item.url in page.url %}
    {% set currentAttribute = 'aria-current="page"' %}
{% endif %}

That means if the navigation item’s URL is found within a page’s URL, that page will show the aria-current="page" attribute on the navigation item. Example: /work/ladbs/ contains /work/, so the Work navigation item on the LADBS page will be marked aria-current="page".

I can then style that in CSS accordingly:

[aria-current="page"] {
  border-bottom:5px solid #66B1BC;
}

The issue

My content doesn’t always follow the navigation item URLs cleanly.

I have 2 kinds of writing that I do: fairly long-form writing and live-tweet notes/summaries, which are much shorter. It didn’t feel right to treat them both the same. I also have talk transcript pages that are related to speaking, but it felt weird to literally have “speaking” in their URLs.

(Overthinking these things is probably a job hazard of doing information architecture! 😅)

Not to mention, the Writing navigation item doesn’t even have /writing/ as its URL, so nothing beyond the first collection page would ever match! And no, I haven’t found a way to easily direct /writing/ to /writing/page-1/ in the front matter without Eleventy complaining about it.

Things I tried

First I tackled it on an individual page level for the talks and notes. I added new data to the front matter, with the intention of assigning it a navigation item. Couldn’t get that to work, probably because of scope and syntax reasons. (If you only know enough code to be dangerous, scope or syntax always trip you up!)

Then I tried fiddling with the comparison operators in the navigation in base.njk. But there isn’t an easy way to write code for “If a slug matches text between slashes, pass it through.” I foresaw a huge mess of code.

The solution

Thinking about the comparison operator, I realized that I could add more oppotunities to match things in the navigation itself.

I decided to add more things to match in site.json even if most of the items would have duplicates. Introducing slug and slugalt!

"headerLinks": [
    {
      "text": "Work",
      "url": "/work/",
      "slug": "/work/",
      "slugalt": "/projects/",
      "external":false
    },
    {
      "text": "Writing",
      "url": "/writing/page-1/",
      "slug": "/writing/",
      "slugalt": "/notes/",
      "external": false
    },
    {
      "text": "Speaking",
      "url": "/speaking/",
      "slug": "/speaking/",
      "slugalt": "/talk/",
      "external": false
    },
    {
      "text": "About",
      "url": "/about/",
      "slug": "/about/",
      "slugalt": "/about/",
      "external": false
    }
  ],

And then I was able to add or logic to base.njk:

{% if item.url in page.url or item.slug in page.url or item.slugalt in page.url %}
    {% set currentAttribute = 'aria-current="page"' %}
{% endif %}

Now, if the page’s URL contains /writing/ or /notes/ in addition to /writing/page-1/ (which was limiting to start with), then it would assign the Writing navigation item as the page it sits under. Bonus is that I don't need to fiddle with any individual pages this way either! Mission accomplished! 🎉

TWiVTLDR 1066

2023-12-01T00:00:00Z

My summary for This Week in Virology Clinical Update #1066:

Some discussion over the microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles in New Zealand suing her employer (University of Auckland) for failing to protect her from harassment when doing her job of communicating science. Dr. Racaniello says researchers should be paid by their universities (and considered re: tenure) to communicate science to the public, but they’re not.
Dr. Racaniello asserts that the global initiative of oral poliovirus vaccine to prevent paralysis has been a failure. Everyone should be using the inactivated vaccine, which is injected. (The U.S. has used the inactivated vaccine since 2000.) This is an issue of cost and equity - the oral vaccine is cheaper and easier to administer.
Older adults getting an RSV and flu vaccine at the same time is safe and effective! Older adults get hospitalized from RSV because of pneumonia. Over 10,000 adults die from RSV every winter. Get those shots!
A study reported that drinking 1-2 cups of coffee a day (morning and afternoon for a dose every 6 hours) apparently reduces risk of getting COVID, as well as COVID severity. They claim decaf works too, and you can add milk and sugar and other stuff. The thing is, they looked at virus binding in vitro in generic immortalized cell lines. Which puts a downer on things: Dr. Griffin wishes they used lung organoid cells instead of the generic HEK293T cells, which are human embryonic kidney cells. (Like, these are the cell lines I used in my molecular biology job 10 years ago and I was not studying respiratory viruses.) Dr. Racaniello is also super dubious of extrapolating an infection model from an in vitro study. Like, the coffee is going to go into your stomach and processed by your body a bunch before it reaches your respiratory tissues. Dr. Griffin jokes about choking on coffee and actually having that be helpful. (The study also had some kind of human trial with 64 people drinking various strengths of coffee, but that didn’t look at actual infection rates.)
Pregnant people who got COVID before 2022 were far more likely to give birth prematurely. This effect generally disappeared by 2022, and disappeared a year earlier in places that adopted the COVID vaccines early. So uh, pregnant folks really need to get vaccinated if they aren’t yet!
A population-based cohort study in Sweden of over 580K people found that the more vaccine doses you had, the more protective it was against long COVID. Vaccine effectiveness against LC was 21% for 1 dose, 59% for 2 doses, and 73% for 3 doses. Also, with their definition of LC, 0.4% of the vaccinated population had LC, which Dr. Racaniello observes is in line with what he expects. (Vs like, 20% in other LC studies.) The study included any vaccine available in Sweden, and note that the most common were Pfizer, Moderna, and AstroZeneca.
“Imprinting” (the idea that an immune response is strongest for an original strain like ancestral COVID) can be overcome if updated vaccines are used. Meaning, if the vaccines don’t have the original strain and only use Omicron variants.
Immunity from a COVID vaccine seems to be more protective against hospitalization and death than the immunity from a prior COVID infection. So that supports getting boosted than believing that an infection is as good as a vaccine for a boost. Dr. Griffin says this jives with what he’s been seeing - he’s seen people on their third COVID infection (but not maximally vaxxed) sick enough to end up in the hospital.
The COVID Novovax vaccine reportedly results in less side-effects than the mRNA vaccines, so go get that one if the Pfizer and Moderna have been tough! There are still some cases of pericarditis with Novovax, just not as many as with the mRNA vaccines. (And it was still rare, at any rate...vaccines are still better than getting COVID in that respect.)
COVID vaccines boost your long-term T-cell response, in addition to B-cell/antibody response. So even if you’re deficient in B cells, it’s still worth it to get vaccinated!
An oral antiviral VV116 helped people recover completely from COVID symptoms 2 days faster compared to placebo (11 days vs 13 days). Dr. Griffin says this isn’t as impressive as he would like. VV116 works similarly to remdesivir, and doesn’t have drug-drug interactions like with Paxlovid.
Hospitalized-but-not-in-ICU patients given a therapeutic dose of heparin helped with symptoms that affected quality of life (pain, activities, self-care). Note that the study data was from 2020/2021, so not the more recent strains.
From listener q: Loss of taste and smell does not count as a “symptom” when you’re talking about being “symptom-free” for transmission purposes. There are people out there who still can’t taste or smell a year out....

TWiVTLDR 1064

2023-11-22T00:00:00Z

My summary for This Week in Virology Clinical Update #1064:

The CDC released 70K+ more doses of the RSV vaccines for babies.
The anti-vaccine movement is starting to show in measles cases. Increase of 18% in cases and 43% increase in deaths worldwide from 2021 to 2022. Most of the deaths are in young kids.
A VA study found that people taking immunosuppressive drugs for organ transplants, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), or psoriasis are still somewhat likely develop severe COVID-19 even if they’ve been vaccinated. 22.7% of organ transplant recipients are likely to get severe COVID, 12.8% of rheumatoid arthritis patients, 6.9% of IBD patients, and 7.3% of psoriasis patients. And Paxlovid helped a lot.
And another Paxlovid “rebound” study, comparing COVID patients of similar health histories that were treated or untreated with Paxlovid. To start, they really broaden the definition of “rebound” so that 20% of the untreated group would qualify as having “rebound.” Many people in both treated and untreated groups still report having at least 1 COVID symptom even after day 15 (70%). Also, only about 20% of people in both groups are testing negative on PCR tests by day 10. Both Drs. Griffin and Racaniello point out how “odd” this is, and question how you’re going to measure “rebound” if nobody goes to zero to rebound from? The study did find that people who took Paxlovid have fewer symptoms and lower viral load than untreated, so it should still help with transmission. And observe that symptom rebound is a separate thing from viral rebound. So Paxlovid should really be prescribed for everyone who is high risk.
The middling results of using COVID convalescent plasma (given to immunocompromised people who can’t take anything else) may be down to timing - if you give it late, it doesn’t have much of an effect. Also, the vast majority of the people given COVID convalescent plasma were also on steroid drugs at the time, which may have affected the plasma’s impact. (You take steroids when you want to tamp down inflammation from a hyperactive immune response.) It basically emphasizes the importance of giving COVID convalescent plasma during the first week.
Taking 100mg of fluvoxamine 2x a day (an SSRI mostly used for OCD treatment) does not help people recover faster from mild to moderate COVID. Apparently a bunch of people really thought this would work, because it was a thing that people told each other to take for COVID recovery. Sorry, it doesn’t work!
Another thing that doesn’t help with COVID disease progression - Conestat A (ConA) a recombinant human C1 inhibitor, which generally affects inflammation. They even stopped the study early because of how useless it was.
A small study showed that people with long COVID do not have reactivated Epstein-Barr virus in their blood. Dr. Griffin wants to reframe this, since some of his long COVID patients do have reactivated EBV, but some do not. It’s certainly true it’s not causative, but it also highlights the fact that a blood test for long COVID is still a ways off.
From a listener question: The renal dose of Paxlovid should only be given to patients who have documented kidney function issues. Some doctors prescribe it to anyone older than 65, but Dr. Griffin says it’s better to give the full dose unless warranted.

TWiVTLDR 1062

2023-11-17T00:00:00Z

My summary for This Week in Virology Clinical Update #1062:

More kindergarteners are being exempted from “required” vaccinations for various things nowadays, including DTap and polio. The percentage of exempted children is more than 5% in 10 states. Most exemptions were “philosophical.” 😅
Dr. Griffin notes that people are assuming endemic COVID would have similar seasonalities to flu...and not other coronaviruses. 😅 Scientists have modeled it and have come up with a really interesting prediction of where COVID will peak in the future around the world. (😅 on Amsterdam always being at a moderate risk with no peak or lull...)
Babies younger than 6 months are protected somewhat from COVID infection when their birth parents are vaccinated during pregnancy. There’s no difference when the birth parent is vaccinated before pregnancy - it’s best to get a booster during the third trimester.
More observational studies about Paxlovid rebound! Dr. Griffin notes the “controversial” paper redefined what “rebound” is - not just return of symptoms, but checking people 3x a week with PCR tests, for any sort of detectable viral particles, or a 4x increase of viral particles even if it never goes to zero. Both Dr. Racaniello and Dr. Griffin “cry foul” for this new definition of rebound - “the game is rigged.” They walk through the figures anyway, and discuss how RNA copy number is not correlated 1:1 with infectivity due to the scale of the measurements used. (And you cannot tell how infectious you are on how dark your positive antigen test is either!) They acknowledge that even though symptoms can return and some jump in viral detection based on current test protocols, nobody who experienced a Paxlovid “rebound” needed to go to the hospital. And in this very study, only 8 of the ~70 participants who experienced a “rebound” in viral load (based on this “rigged” definition) experienced any symptoms at all. The hosts also discuss how some doctors avoid prescribing Paxlovid for nonsensical reasons, like rebound symptoms being worse than nontreated COVID (they aren’t) and preventing transmission during rebound (uhh, Paxlovid is an antiviral and should help with that...??). There also aren’t any indications that anyone taking Paxlovid has ever transmitted COVID onwards.

Jury trial observations

2023-06-28T00:00:00Z

For the past 5.5 weeks, I’ve been on the jury for a civil trial. We had a few more weeks to go, but they settled today, woohoo! I can finally say something about it!

So uh, here are some lessons about the subject matter in the trial that I will take with me: 😅

You cannot necessarily tell if a truck requires a commercial license to drive just by looking at it. It’s sobering to realize that a big box truck driving next to you on the freeway could be driven by any old schmuck. 😱 Yes, even if that truck has a company logo on it. (“Commercial license” is classified by the vehicle’s total weight capacity.)
I personally will only acquire furniture I can transport home myself. Or order/have it delivered from a local store.
If you buy from a big furniture chain, keep in mind that convenience likely comes at a price, even if you do not personally pay it. Big chain = central warehouse out in the boonies. Drivers and helpers then have to drive out to do deliveries and assembly. All day, and sometimes well into the evening. And then have to drive back to the warehouse in the boonies to return the truck. One person testified they sometimes got back to the warehouse at 2am, having started at 6am. 😱 You think these people get overtime? HAH. (TBF, the company’s lawyer assured the jury that they’ve “changed things” since the incident 5 years ago, but I have my doubts about this manifestation of capitalism...)
Driving closely behind a big rig is a very bad idea. Even in the slow lane. A VERY BAD IDEA. (My husband does this constantly, and I hope my description of this case scared the beejezus out of him! 😅)
In fact, driving in the slow lane is not necessarily as safe as you think it is, especially in the dark. Center lane for me in the future...
If you stop your car where there’s traffic, plzzzz be sure your lights are visible to oncoming traffic. Move your car so that it is. Flashing lights do no good if they’re blocked by a disabled vehicle.
If you write bullshit on your company website, it is possible that you will be dragged into a courtroom to be asked about it by a lawyer. (Probable, no. But possible, yes.) They will embarrass you about it in a courtroom full of people. 😅

On the more lighthearted side, here are things I learned about trials as a juror that were not obvious even watching Law and Order a lot as a kid:

A sign we are living in the future: When I was summoned for jury duty, the jury selection was over Zoom. 🤯 A sign I am ready for this future: I couldn’t sign into the jury portal, but I correctly guessed the typo that was in my date of birth. 🤣
Court reporters are total beasts, and cannot be replaced by AI right now. Like, a lawyer raises an objection, then the judge reads the transcript from half a second ago. 😅 (Also, one of our court reporters had a pink stenotype keyboard, which made me happy every time I looked at it.)
Sitting in the courtroom listening to testimony all day was surprisingly reminiscent of my job as government content designer. Get a bunch of people’s takes on something, then piece it together.
Having witnesses do testimony over Zoom adds a whole other level of complication/entertainment. 😅 Especially when there’s a delay, heh.
I do want to find out what kind of software the techs were using to zoom into PDFs over Zoom. It looked neat!
The legal profession is propping up the 4- and 5-inch binder industry all by itself.
Playing recorded depositions after lunch is a terrible idea. 😴 Even live witness testimony over Zoom is more engaging, since it’s possible for a lawyer to raise an objection at any time. (And then sometimes they all get into it, and in my head I’m going, “Fight, fight, fight!”)

An Event Apart SF 2022

2022-12-14T00:00:00Z

A post-conference reflection

When Eric Meyer emailed me one day out of the blue, asking if I was interested in speaking at An Event Apart, I couldn’t believe my eyes. When I was just getting started in UX, I knew I’d get the most illuminating (and current!) tips about design and web development from any An Event Apart conferences. And you’d know when one was happening because design Twitter would just explode with enlightening gems.

Being asked to speak at one was beyond my wildest dreams. But alas, the talk deadline would literally be a month after my first baby was due, so I put on my leadership pants and asked to be put on the speaker list for a future event. (After Baby was old enough to be vaccinated for COVID, specifically.)

I ended up presenting on the mainstage (!!!) on what ended up being the very last An Event Apart conference. Although I’m sad that there won’t be another such gathering, I feel so grateful and honored to be one of the speakers sending it off.

Here are the notes that I took, the last live-tweets that I ever did on Twitter. (RIP Twitter...)

Declarative Design by Jeremy Keith

Two kinds of music composition: Mozart writing every note down, then there’s Miles Davis doing improv.

Same thing in programming too—imperative programming gives the computer step by steps. Then there’s declarative programming (like SQL), where you tell the computer the result you want.

Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web with the “principle of least power”—use the most efficient way to parse information. Both HTML and CSS are declarative, fault-tolerant languages. They ignore what they don’t understand.

CSS is thought of as declarative, but it’s actually more suggestive. It’s more of a conversation between the end users, browser, and the author.

There’s also JavaScript, which is an imperative language. It’s more powerful, but it’s more fragile. If it doesn’t understand a direction, it throws an error.

You can use imperative and declarative languages together—use declarative approach first, then use imperative to be more specific. Ex: inputs. Defaults to text field, but you can specify email, telephone, etc.

Using a simpler solution lower in the tech stack means the solution is more robust. “JS should only do what only JS can do.” Don’t write dozens of lines of code when you can use <button/>! But many programmers want the kind of control imperative langs give.

Imperative mindset = working off of a lot of assumptions. Using a declarative mindset gets you thinking about what the browser might be doing by default and adjusting. (Ex: padding-left = the start of a line assumes your user will be reading left to right.)

Let the browser do calculations. “Be the browser’s mentor, not its micromanager” according to buildexcellentwebsit.es

We even have imperative and declarative approaches to management! Imperative management = micromanaging, declarative management = trust to get to an outcome. It depends on the culture.

Jeremy says that design systems make clear the culture. It’s “the way we do things around here.” You can take an imperative and declarative approaches to design systems too.

You can have imperative and declarative thinking. Analytical thinking is imperative = v. exact, great for zooming in, not great for people. Systems thinking is declarative thinking = about relationships. Design systems are often imperative, thus fragile.

Instead of using hex codes to define colors, how about using relationships? Ex: the fill should be 10% lighter than the border. You can use CSS to get the browser to calculate that.

Remember that the tools we use start to change the way we work. The way we design right now (including Figma prototyping) is VERY imperative. Jeremy quotes Dan Mall: “Let’s not design in the browser, let’s decide in the browser.” It always depends! The imperative approach works for print and native apps, but doesn’t work so well for the web. We’re trying to control something we can’t actually control. “Fighting for control on the web is a losing battle.”

My AEA SF talk about working collaboratively during COVID

The view out into the audience at tech check!

Read the transcript, although the super TL;DR takeaways:

Other people are not obstacles to getting your work done. People are how the work gets done. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦
If your org was committed to success, they will give you the means to succeed. 💪

An attendee offered “Never panic alone” in the Q&A and Morton Rand-Hendrickson offered this meme. My job is done.

How to Win at ARIA and Influence Web Accessibility by Tolu Adegbite

The point of ARIA is to indicate to assistive technologies about what’s visually happening on a component.

It’s important for UX designers to understand how ARIA works, because it’s how nonsighted users will experience the web. Otherwise you delegate that decision-making entirely to devs.

Tolu recommends doubling up in code when using native HTML landmarks, since assistive tech reads them out inconsistently. So even if you’re using <nav> it’s a good idea to also use <role=“navigation”> to make sure all your bases are covered!

Overdoing ARIA attributes can make the experience worse than not using ARIA at all. “A role is a promise.”

If you don’t understand how an ARIA attribute works, it’s better not to use it. Always prioritize native HTML tags. Do not change native semantics unless you really have to. Make sure interactive ARIA controls are visible and usable with a keyboard.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had to implement ARIA attributes myself, but it’s super cool that there’s ways to indicate context to nonsighted users, like “complementary” landmarks for related content!

The attribute aria-describedby can be useful in a password text field to connect it to its help text, so the help text is read when they land on the password field instead of having to tab over. That’s part of the user’s experience!

Navigating challenges in your (fill in the blank) career by Fonz Morris

Have patience and resilience. Fonz had to go outside his comfort zone seeking resources to bolster his computer science education. But it was a journey, including a uni transfer.
Have a strategy. Don’t just react, have a plan. And remember to learn EQ, not just hitting the books (IQ). It depends on the situation, sometimes you’ll need to learn more IQ too.
Decide your impact level. This depends on what you CAN do, and where you are in your career. Doing everything as an entrepreneur worked for Fonz when he was young, but then he went back to corporate and had to learn about promotion levels. He missed out on 2 promotion cycles despite doing everything he was supposed to, then went to his head of design with the goal of getting clarity. Turns out the internal system wasn’t working well for him, and perhaps for others there. It’s not just about you.
Mentorship. Mentors provide clarity and support when you need it. Career progression is a lot messier than just a ladder! ADPlist, Rethink, dev color, Mentorpass, General Assembly, LinkedIn.

Q&A

Fonz thinks bootcamps CAN be a good equalizer—you don’t need to graduate from certain unis to learn. But you still need real world experience. And some of those bootcamps are prohibitively expensive!

Fonz says to treat burnout, take a break! And ask yourself what you’re burnt out about. The solution depends on if you’re burnt out from your job, your company, or your industry. Find what gives you a spark (anything!) and pursue that.

Re: short tenures at companies, Fonz says it’s important to treat yourself as the stakeholder of your own growth and career. (Just like companies are beholden to their stakeholders!) Be truthful when a company isn’t working for you.

Multilingual design for the web (and beyond) by Preston So

Multilingual web design isn’t just adding a language selector or a Google Translate widget. It’s about understanding the languages our users use and how they work.

More CSS properties to help meet our users where they are, no matter what language they’re using:

dir
writing-mode
lang (even mixed with another languages)
text-orientation
text-combine-upright

Remember to use HTML first to set the default reading direction, don’t just use CSS to do whatever you want. Set the structure first.

Markup that I never knew about, to help give readers of logographic languages more context about a character they might not know about: ruby and rb

Also, the CSS prop text-emphasis can customize text styles you want to bold, but bold wouldn’t look great. (Ex: putting a red dot next to Chinese characters.)

Preston encourages us to think more logically in our web layouts, not physical. That gives us more flexibility when it comes to languages. Be agnostic to writing mode, not specific. Try stuff like margin-block-start instead of margin-top.

Physical properties (Specific to writing mode)	Logical properties (Agnostic to writing mode)
border-left	border-inline-start (horizontal-tb, LTR)
margin-right	margin-inline-end
padding-top	padding-block-start
clear: left;	clear: start;
float: right;	float: inline-end;
text-align: left;	text-align: inline-start;

There’s even markup to indicate how spoken language should be read on platforms like Siri. Not much for signed languages yet, but Preston is excited to see what comes up next.

Takeaways:

Understand your users’ languages deeply and treat them all as first-class citizens
Use lang attributes
Pay attention to lines of text (breaks, wrap, hyphenations)
Respect directions the text can go

And think bigger beyond the web!

Transform your Meetings into Hybrid Workshops by Erin Casali

Remote collaboration should not actually default to calls or meetings. Think about if they’re sync/async or in-person/virtual, but they can be combined too.

You want to leverage the benefits of each approach—it’s not about not meeting anyone ever. Async can make it possible for the less boisterous people to contribute too. Ask what the outcome of this call should be.

Sync is best when you need:

To get order out of chaos
Socialization
Get clarity when things are confusing!

When you want the a deliverable, or to get unstuck, use sync+async approach. Use all the approaches to get the best ideas.

Updates, knowledge transfer, and decision-making should be async. People need time to absorb that kind of info.

“Remote-first” doesn’t necessarily mean 100% remote, it’s just that everyone is equal. You need a set of rules that apply to everyone, a set of process that works for everyone.

You can run workshops in serial or parallel. Serials means one process in order, with same ppl. Parallel means you combine results from virtual and in-person workshops. Erin does not advise running a virtual+in-person workshop at once. Try remote first, then hybrid.

The most important thing when running workshops is to avoid creating 2 tiers of people. Remote is inherently inclusive.

To get the best ideas, people should ideate on their own first (async), then bring the group together to brainstorm (sync). It’s not just about reading in advance, but give people a useful activity to do on their own.

During the workshop process, the only part that needs to be sync is the convergence of ideas. Everything else can be async!

This kind of hybrid workshop doesn’t necessarily take more time. Planning a workshop would take time, no matter what format. But async means you can wait longer for people to give their input.

Patterns to use in workshops

Async

Prepare the board: pre-fill it with existing data so everything is ready to discuss.
Use individual boards: Provide a separate board to everyone, decide if same or separate spaces.
Use individual stickies: Everyone works on same board but provide individually-labelled stickies.

You can give workshop participants their own board if they really need to think about something. But if they’re sharing what they already know, having everyone together on the same board (with their own stickies) works well.

Sync

Dot voting: Get people’s consensus on something. It’s effective when you need to steer conversation to the work itself instead of a random tangent.
Silent sorting. Give 10 min for people to sort ideas without talking. It focuses more on the work instead of having to say something about it.
Breakout rooms: You can also use breakout rooms to get people discussing a particular thing, but in a more controlled way.

Pro-tip: plan but be flexible

Flex time or flex agenda. Plan activities, but be open to letting people continue to work together if they’re really in a flow. (Or skip an activity if it becomes clear it won’t be effective.)

For hybrid workshops, it’s important to have everyone focus on something, whether it’s a whiteboard or a live doc. That way, it’s easy to orient yourself about what to work off of.

Changing the culture around workshops

“Change is hard! Inertia usually wins.” Start small with these new hybrid workshops, run experiments, then review its effectiveness and success.

Retros for your experiments can nurture motivation. Then you can ID champions for your change and support your champions when they run their own experiments!

In a call-centric culture, having time to do activities can be hard. People are always scheduled for calls! You can block people’s time to devote to doing an activity instead. (But ask them first, if needed!)

Every workshop has (or needs) structure. Highly-aligned teams often seem like they don’t need structure, but that’s because structure is already inherent in the team!

If you have a high-level stakeholder who LOVES long, unstructured meetings, you have to find out what their fear is, and then determine how to mitigate that. Everyone has their own reason for wanting unstructured meetings.

Designing Better Onboarding with Krystal Higgins

How do you balance understanding with “engagement” and features and prompts?

If we act on our fear (that our users will miss something!) then it can lead to unhelpful solutions! If you front-load instructions, they’re hard to remember, out of context, and have questionable value.

And framing is important. If you give people ALL the instructions up front, it can give the impression that a task must be super hard! Plus they’re costly to maintain.

Better onboarding is about guided interaction, not front-loaded instructions. It means:

Anchoring info to action in context
Onboarding users at their own pace
Integrating guidance authentically instead of tacking it on

Guided interactions can mean putting call to actions in context, when your user can truly understand what they can get. Ex: Canva encouraging signups only after a new user has made and saved a graphic, so they can edit later.

Consider how you’re measuring onboarding success. Less signups and clickthrus, more retention and engagement.

Less these	More these
Sign up rate	Better short/mid-tern retention
Clickthrough rate	Deeper feature engagement
Tutorial/setup completion rate	Adoption in new markets
Memorizing features in study	Higher revenue

Onboarding ends when core use begins, when a user sustains their needs while contributing to the product. You’ll need to figure out what actions define “core use,” then create a user journey with actions. Determine the prompt for an action, what work they’re doing, and what sort of follow-up they need. Think about what guidance the user might need at each stage.

When you create guided interactions in context, this gives users way more flexibility in how they use your product! And remember that a better onboarding experience comes from a good product design. It’s not just something tacked on that fixes everything.

Remember the basic of good product design before you consider extra fancy UI patterns: concepts, content, navigation, affordances, tutorials.

Beware onboarding overlays. If they interrupt a task, 90% of users will just ignore them! Plus overlays are likely to collide with each other since they’re designed in isolation. (Not to mention a mess for screenreaders!)

Example of guided interactions just for new users: an in-field prompt to “tab” for Gmail smart replies, along with a tooltip off to the side of your composer window. The longer you use Gmail, eventually the prompts disappear.

Guided interactions can also help users of all levels. Brand new Notion users are shown a particular blank page template, with prompts.

A private Notion page encourages new users to try features while interacting with existing page blocks.

But even experienced users never encounter a wholly blank page. The default new page looks different depending on user needs.

An untitled page in Notion for a typical user, offering the most common page options.

To get your team on board with better onboarding (harhar), define core use and break down any action they care about right now. Can try reducing overlays or front-loaded instructions, or improving an empty state.

Also try new user perspectives! Get your team using private browsing modes for a bit. Journal new experiences, and include new users in research plans.

We also need to get out of the “user education” mindset. We frame ourselves as the experts, and whyyy are new users not getting what we designed?? But we have to build products that adapt to our users!

Remember to build in ways to recover from errors. You cannot stop people from running into problems, but you can make easy ways to undo or recover from it.

What if People Weren’t the Product? Building a web that loves humanity by David Dylan Thomas

(Yes, we gave each other high fives at the speaker dinner about having talks about becoming person-oriented!)

Back in the truly olden days, we didn’t have mirrors. To see ourselves, we needed to find a still body of water. Instead, we looked at each other.

With the advent of mirrors, we suddenly became aware of how we looked to other people. The results ranged from 1st person novels to standing armies. Now the web, where “we cannot get away from ourselves” with ad personalization. We see ourselves as a product.

It all culminates in the term “personal brand.” Dave asks if we all died a little inside when we first heard it. 😅 But as James Baldwin said, eventually the world isn’t the thing that oppresses us. We oppress ourselves.

We see ourselves as products, and other people>products are getting more hits! The comparison is killing us. How much time should a user spend engaging with your platform? (And what would your shareholders say?) “Seriously, fuck engagement.”

This is the scariest graph about engagement:

The closer content comes to being banned because of its incendiary, dangerous nature, the more people engaged with it. Even when they said they hated it! (And the more the company makes money!)

Mark Zuckerberg knew this. Facebook let content calling for the genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar stay online. They traded lives for engagement. Social media talk about fixing it, but the policies and incentives haven’t changed much. (Seriously, fuck engagement.)

There’s another way. The Siksika Nation (Blackfoot) have a concept of self-actualization that assumes everyone has already arrived, not anything you have to work for. The most wealthy are the most generous. You have nothing because you have given it all away.

Standup meetings actually display this Siksika thinking. A successful standup is when you unblock something for another.

Our current incentives are messed up! Capitalism encourages people to behave badly (to get more and more stuff), but puts in a ton of rules to try and stop people from doing immoral stuff, even if it goes against the system of capitalist rules!

What if we could consider our design process done when we have returned what we took back to the earth? (Designer Sadie Red Wing thinks about this stuff!)

The worst cognitive bias, according to Dave, is the “just world hypothesis.” With that bias, you believe bad things only happen to bad people. Everything that happens to you is your fault. It keeps us from thinking about systems (or having to fix them).

Our current system is also based a ton of assumptions. NYTimes in Europe switched from personalized to contextual advertising and actually increased their revenue! (DuckDuckGo uses only contextual advertising and is doing great!)

To get past the just world hypothesis, instead of asking yourself “Am I a good person?” ask yourself “Am I getting closer to my values?” (Also, therapy!)

Make a list of things your company or your stakeholders are willing to leave money on the table for. The shorter that list, the more unethical your company might be!

Can we practice interdependent design instead, where we prioritize connections to the people, the land, and our values? Can we design a web that reflects our values, where we live, and ppl we can help?

To do:

ID your values.
Start looking at how your work gets you closer or further away from those values.
Co-imagine the future with the people hurt by the present.

Everything we fight were just ideas once. So what’s your idea? What’s our idea? What can we create together?

Gratitude

2021-09-10T00:00:00Z

About 2 weeks ago, I gave birth to my first baby. After a fairly uneventful pregnancy (where I continued being the sole content designer on SF COVID work almost the whole time), the delivery was more complicated. But baby is healthy and I am well on the road to recovery!

I haven’t quite internalized that I am a mom quite yet. Instead, the overwhelming feeling I have is gratitude. Gratitude for a healthy baby who came out crying lustily and immediately opening her eyes to look at me.

Gratitude for the epidural that made me blissfully unaware of the bleeding and resulting medical urgency right after the birth. (My husband and aunt were scared to death though!) Gratitude for said husband, relatives, and a postpartum doula who insist on putting my recovery first.

I’m not used to putting myself first. In fact, I’m completely capable of working myself into the ground and through to the other side, as the COVID work shows! I have a high tolerance for work. But this was different—it would take time and some care. I’m not used to that.

I also feel gratitude for the COVID response work that we did over the past year. The hospital that I gave birth at was not overrun by COVID-19 patients. I even got to stay an extra day for my recovery! (A lot of people gave birth the week I did though! 😆)

Lastly, gratitude for the scientific miracle that are the COVID-19 vaccines. When I found out I was pregnant, it was during the terrible holiday surge. But I hoped things would be better in 2021. We knew by then that we had 2 vaccines that worked beyond our wildest dreams. 🤞🏻

I found out I was pregnant the first week I worked on vaccine content. I went into labor the day the FDA approved the Pfizer vaccine. It seemed serendipitous—I named my daughter Kariko, after Dr. Katalin Kariko who created the vaccine that protects me and baby.

The future still seems uncertain for all of us, even beyond COVID-19. But we must continue to be inspired and motivated by smart, optimistic, tenacious people like Dr. Kariko. We can only make progress together. We owe it to the next generation to try.

Content design for behavior change

2021-08-13T00:00:00Z

“Content design” as a discipline is becoming more and more popular. Not only is its importance felt in government spaces, but it’s also now the default job title for content jobs at Facebook.

Content design focuses on user needs and tasks

Why this shift to content design specifically? According to content design pioneer Sarah Winters, “Content design is answering a user need in the best way for the user to consume it.”

For product and service-focused content, it seems like a natural progression for what content can do. It’s all about the user and what they need.

For me in non-pandemic times working at San Francisco Digital Services, content design usually means explaining a government process in a task-based way. I help explain how a program works, just enough so that someone can successfully apply for it. No more, no less.

Enter COVID-19

But for COVID-19 response communications, I had another layer added on top.

We had to encourage certain behaviors in our constituents. Not just how to do something, but to introduce the idea to them in the first place. We had to get people to mask up, get tested, and avoid gathering with others. And later, we had to encourage people to get vaccinated for COVID-19.

It’s not quite as simple as explaining what to do! We have to embed little nudges for behavior change, while informing our readers about how to get something done.

It’s even harder when it’s something that people are not used to doing!

In the past year, I did a lot of reading about how to do this with content. Here are some of the things I put into practice for SF.gov.

Know what your medium is capable of

“Content is king.”

A nice thought for anyone who content designs for screens, but unfortunately, inadequate for the job at hand. Words on a screen does not make the biggest difference in encouraging a change in behavior.

What does? Personal relationships, making connections face to face, and using emotions to connect with people.

Websites are not good for that. Websites are words on a page. You can’t relate to that. It comes off as extremely disingenuous. There is absolutely nothing I could write on SF.gov that connects to people like others telling their personal stories.

What SF.gov could do was tell the general public what they could do right away. It could empower people with information. SF.gov could also be used as a tool for partners and the public, to support them while they have those conversations with people they know.

SF.gov could step in for support, once someone’s found the internal motivation to change their behavior. Help your partners help you.

Communicate mental models, not just facts

Your users have to understand the why, and find it compelling, before they develop the motivation to try something new.

For people to understand why they should do something new, you need to explain the new state of things, and how it’s different from the former state of things. What has changed in general, and what that means for them.

Content design already puts us halfway there. Good content design inherently avoids listing a bunch of information at random. That’s part of its impact. It takes a lot of mental effort to pull out actionable items from a set of detailed facts.

Content design is also inherently a BS-free zone. You have to cut the fluff and be as direct as you can. That matters even more when you have to explain why people should do something.

I always make the effort to learn about what I was writing, inside and out. I’ve always said, “If I don’t know it, I can’t write it.”

Talk, or at least listen, to the experts

The best way to get the correct framing is to talk to subject matter experts (SMEs). Really understand where their heads are at. In all likelihood, you do not have the technical expertise to understand what a list of written facts truly means.

I have a molecular biology background. Understanding the nuances and limitations of scientific studies came naturally to me. But I (still!) am not an expert in public health, or respiratory illnesses, or even infectious diseases in general. If you gave me facts or a paper to read, I wouldn’t know how to frame it in a way that was most useful, or necessarily consistent with the experts’ conclusions.

My colleagues at SF Department of Public Health (SFDPH) were invaluable. Over the past year, I asked them many questions about various situations, so I could truly understand what any public health guidelines meant. Talking it out ensured that everyone was on the same page too.

If you don’t have colleagues who can help with this, reading or listening to other experts can give you some idea.

Upon California’s lauded reopening on June 15, 2021, I knew that we couldn’t have “Stay home” as a headline anymore on the main webpage that talked about the public health order. It would be drastically inconsistent with the new mental model, that the state would be reopening. But we still had to have something, and my SFDPH colleagues were looking to me for the content ideas!

When I have a block like this, I do more research. I listen to COVID-related podcasts like In the Bubble and This Week in Virology, where experts communicate their thoughts directly to the public. And I noticed all the hosts had a similar farewell at the end of each episode: “Be safe.”

I realized that’s what I could use instead: “Stay safe” instead of “Stay home.” It was both pithy and consistent with our new mental model.

Sweat consistent messaging, not esoteric details

The website is only a part of an overall communications strategy. Every time your product or service is mentioned by anyone anywhere, ideally, people should know what it’s about.

You have to be aligned on high-level messaging. Work with anyone who might be involved in communications. If there’s someone else creating the high-level messaging, follow their lead. Any dissonance confuses people and loses their trust. People will also lose any motivation to change their behavior for you. They won’t believe anything else you have to say.

If you need to get in front of something now, put your efforts into making sure your overall messaging is consistent, and leave the details for later. It’s better to immediately publish the right mental model with details 90% correct, than to be 100% correct on absolutely all details but a week late.

This was especially important for anything related to COVID-19. News and rumors traveled fast and furious. We had to get in front of them, and offer accurate mental models to people right away. If people don’t understand what’s going on, they will make something up (or read something unofficial) to explain what they just saw. And more often then not, they end up believing their first explanation long-term. Mental models are hard to shake!

COVID-19 messaging work in San Francisco

SF had a lot going for it during the pandemic, which helped us achieve the lowest death rate in any major city in the country. We’re a city and county in one, which streamlined many of our workflows. Our leaders worked together and listened to the science to save lives, and we already had a lot of community-level public health partnerships from the AIDS crisis decades ago.

Still, one thing that surprised me was that our local news media was usually simpatico with our overall messaging. Clickbait, contradictory headlines were few and far between, unlike what I saw with other localities.

There are likely many reasons for this. But from what I saw, SF’s COVID-19 response communications team put great efforts in making sure anyone doing COVID-19 communications had information directly from us. The team held media roundtables for reporters and community-based organizations. They fielded calls from reporters constantly. We all made sure the messaging was consistent, so everyone would say the same thing.

What I could do was make sure SF.gov was consistent with any changes in messaging. Every time there was an update about staying home or masking, I’d make sure all of those changes were reflected on all pages that mentioned staying home or masking.

When you ask people to do something they’re not used to doing, they often check to confirm what they’ve just read. If one page says one thing but another page contradicts it, you’ve completely lost people’s trust.

Human beings don’t make decisions in a vacuum, nor do we have limitless mental energy to make decisions on every single action we take. Instead, we base a lot of our behaviors on external factors, including what is default, or what others are doing.

By changing our language a little, we can reframe a brand new behavior to be a new social norm. If you overexplain yourself, your readers might wonder why you’re trying so hard to convince them. Frame it as a default social norm instead.

Teaching how to have safer gatherings during the pandemic

When SFDPH wrote public health guidance about how to have safer gatherings in summer 2020, I noted that it had a lot of useful information. But it still came across as a list of facts that everyone had to find, read, and then learn from on their own. There was no indication that this would be a shared understanding.

I figured that this was information people would be clamoring for, so I content designed it to make it as task-based as possible. Not only that, but I also hinted at some social norms into the title and description of the page itself. Instead of walking people through detailed explanations of the instructions, I shortcut all of it to the conclusion:

“Have safer outdoor gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic. Reduce your risk of COVID-19 when celebrating a special occasion outside with a small group.”

By being upfront and direct about what you expect people to do, you set the expectation that others are doing it too.

Respect your users

Respect their time, and respect what experience they already bring when they come across your content. When you ask them to change their behavior, you’re really asking them to be partners with you.

When I was onsite at Moscone Center doing COVID-19 response work, I had 2 Post-Its on my monitor at all times that displayed the following (in italics):

BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) so people get the info they need right off the bat
Explain why we’re asking people to do something
Options/tradeoffs so people feel they have control, and are making an educated choice
Acknowledge ❤️ and 😮 to ease people gently into the new mental model

The Post-Its, and a stuffed Pusheen because we all need joy in these times!

That list was what I came up with, after learning about crisis communications and distilling it into what I could do with SF.gov’s content. When I was writing a new piece of content, it was a good reminder to make sure I’d checked off all those boxes.

Answer their questions without asking the questions outright

Asking people to change their behavior is a huge ask. It’s also very stressful if it comes with a shift in mental models. When people are stressed, they don’t read. They need the answers right away.

Your users will be already asking the question in their heads. They don’t need to read it again before getting the answer they seek. It wastes your screen space and your readers’ goodwill.

It’s also not friendly to people using screenreaders, who often use headings to navigate the page.

By asking the exact question you think everyone may be asking, you may also frame the content in a way that harms your overall goal. Your users should not be setting the frame—you should. (That is also a big reason why I dislike FAQs. A lot.)

Note that when I write headings, even on this page, I’m already telling you what the answer is. You read further to get more detail about how to do it.

Stay positive, not punitive

Assume people will do the right thing. Focus on what people can do now, not what they cannot or should not do.

Motivation must come from within. We need to nurture it by encouraging action and empowerment. That’s the only way we can encourage everyone to be partners with us.

Encouraging people to stay home for the holidays

In Winter 2020, we already expected we’d have to mandate business closures again. But we were also concerned about private gatherings for the holidays, which we expected to be a big source of COVID-19 spread.

Namely, we didn’t want people to gather outside of their household. At all. This is a huge ask! The holidays are meant for gathering indoors and seeing loved ones. We didn’t want to bring people down even further.

In the introductory text of the holiday-related webpage, I walked people through the following thought process:

Bottom line up front: We have to celebrate the holidays at home this year.
All of us have an impact.
Things are looking pretty bad, so that’s why we’re asking you to do this. We know it isn’t normal.
Here’s what you can do to help.

The 'What's allowed and not allowed' heading told readers what the rules were upfront.

If something was expressly forbidden, we’d tell them not to do it. But otherwise, it was all about encouraging the behavior that we wanted to see.

Think about future implications

Avoid boxing yourself into a corner, especially when you give explanations. Make room for change.

Since content has to be as short as possible, I like to go as high-level and general as I can when it comes to explanations.

Mental models can be hard to shift, especially if they’re large, sudden changes. We have to ease users into a new world where a new behavior is encouraged.

The biggest example of keeping our options open during the pandemic was masks. Before scientists realized that masks were actually quite important to prevent the spread, “masks aren’t effective for the general public” was a message that some national official channels really claimed!

But SFDPH never went that far. Early on, they only said “there is no recommendation to wear masks” which I believe gave us a lot of room to shift later.

Again, work with your SMEs to make sure you all agree on future implications. They may want to overpromise too!

Introducing vaccines

When I was first writing vaccine content, I wanted to ease everyone into the idea of getting them. There were many talking points SFDPH was using in December 2020, but I didn’t want to overpromise based on current data. I wanted to say something that would continue to be true, no matter what new data might say.

I settled on “A safe and effective vaccine is one of the most important ways to end the pandemic.” At the end of the day, that’s the goal of everything. It’s as high-level as you can get! That statement is also something we haven’t had to change, even as efficacy continues to be studied in the face of the more-transmissible Delta variant.

Be culturally aware and stay flexible

Many of our content design standards are from GOV.UK. That isn’t surprising, since the concept of “content design” was defined and refined there. But what works in the UK may not work in SF.

Even though we’ve gotten great feedback about our content overall, it doesn’t necessarily mean it works for absolutely everyone we serve in San Francisco.

We’re still learning! Working with colleagues from diverse backgrounds and community-based organizations ensured that we were as culturally aware as possible when creating targeted campaigns.

We wrote 'commemorate' instead of 'celebrate', and avoided stock images of colorful sugar skulls.

You’re always learning how to better connect with people.

Going further with content design

As the field of content design develops and we combine knowledge from other fields, I’m excited to see where it could go next.

The following are some resources that helped me develop my COVID-19 response work principles in the past year.

Websites

CDC’s Crisis and Emergency Risk Communications (CERC) manual (also see how I applied CERC principles to working with stakeholders)
Guide to COVID-19 vaccine communications
de Beaumont
FrameWorks Institute
Everything written by Julia Marcus, Zeynep Tufekci, and Ed Yong in The Atlantic

Coursera courses

Communicating during Global Emergencies (about the CERC manual)
Social Psychology

Taking content design center stage in a crisis

2021-08-05T00:00:00Z

The following is adapted from my Confab 2021 talk.

Starting March 2020, content designers from San Francisco Digital Services were on the front lines of SF’s COVID-19 response. We sat with hundreds of other City staff, all recruited from other departments at the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) at the Moscone Center for 2-week shifts.

Initially, we were asked to publish health orders and other announcements on SF.gov, as soon as they came in. And they were coming in very quickly!

We started to earn trust by working directly with staff from Public Health, Emergency Management, and the Mayor’s Office. We extended that trust by having me be deployed at the EOC long-term. The initial 2-week shift turned into more than a year.

I became a familiar face and got to know many of our stakeholders.

Adapting our content design principles for COVID-19

As things began to settle a little in the summer, it was clear that we needed to rethink our content principles.

We always said that people went to government websites to get stuff done, not get information. But this situation was different.

People would be coming to us, not to get services really. But to get information…to get something done. Namely, information they would need to make a decision on a task they wanted to do. For example, “How can I protect myself when going to the store?”

We did not really have principles for this! What could I do in this ever-changing environment?

I did a bit of research. I figured someone must have come up with some content principles to use in a crisis.

Introducing crisis and emergency risk communications

Lo and behold, someone did. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, our beleaguered CDC, has a manual for crisis and emergency risk communications. Or, the CERC manual.

So over a weekend last summer, I sat down to learn just what CERC was about.

The first thing they impart to you, is that the right message, at the right time, from the right person, can save lives. The stakes couldn’t be any higher.

Crisis communications has special considerations

But what makes crisis comms different from the regular communications that we usually do?

There’s often an unspoken time constraint to everything. The response needs to be immediate.

The crux of the communication is that it should always help people make the best possible decisions about their well-being, often with limited information.

And it helps people accept the imperfect nature of choices, where the decision has to be made quickly.

So all the communication is informational, but it has to serve a task. It has to answer the question, “What do I do?”

Not to mention, users in an emergency are often in a very different mindset than most users of digital products and services!

You have to zero in on:

What do they need now?
How will they best receive the message?
What are they concerned about now?

The 6 principles of CERC

And to lead the way, here are the 6 principles of CERC:

Be first
Be right
Be credible
Express empathy
Promote action
Show respect

All these principles are ways to promote trust in our constituents. That’s the only way this all works.

Use the CERC principles to elevate content design too

And then, I took a longer look at the CERC manual’s definition of crisis comms.

“Providing facts…about an unexpected emergency, beyond an organization’s control, that involves the organization and requires an immediate response.”

That means, working on the response is a crisis within a crisis! Doing crisis comms, is also doing crisis comms!

To truly promote content design in the COVID-19 response work, I would need to practice crisis comms with my colleagues.

So here are the 6 principles of CERC, and what they mean for content designers working with stakeholders.

1. Being fast is your best leverage

The very first CERC principle is to be first. For stakeholders, this means you have to know the landscape and get it done.

The CERC manual says, “Communicating information quickly is crucial. For members of the public, the first source of information often becomes the preferred source.”

In any emergency, it’s important to get your message out there as soon as possible. I found that being first, or at least being fast, actually became my best leverage in elevating content design.

Know the landscape

You have to know what’s going on in general. You don’t necessarily need to know the details, but at least you have to know it’s happening.

This is part of what SF’s COVID-19 response entails:

Anything visual really was the tippy tip of the iceberg.

By knowing the landscape, you’ll know the players. To earn their trust, make their jobs easier, especially for the 311 and social media teams! I give them intel, they give me feedback about what’s happening on the ground. I can then take it back to the decision makers who can actually improve things. It’s a symbiotic relationship, really.

Even for the public health clinicians and lawyers, they write all that content so it’s out there for the public! If you help that content reach more people, everyone wins!

Especially when everyone’s in the middle of operations, nobody’s thinking about the website until the last minute. But you’ll be ready when they do realize it!

Get it done

After you learn about the landscape, then you gotta get it done.

Truthfully, everyone loves a thorough content approval process, until something has to be published “ASAP.” Then the process goes out the window. It’s happened on every single high stakes comms project in this pandemic—testing, reopening, now vaccines.

Getting it done will be your biggest lever.

I’m pretty sure that the biggest reason why I’ve earned so much trust is because I turn operational information into impact right away. Over the past year, I’ve been brought on to meetings where things are decided earlier and earlier. If people want something on SF.gov ASAP, I have to know about it ASAP. Stakeholders do come around on that!

To get it done, you have to know what you’re working with.

One of the first things I did was do a content inventory in Airtable. Yes, even when things are changing all the time, you have to inventory what’s there! You’ll never regret having one, I promise you.

Grouping in Airtable is a feature I use all the time!

This is only a tiny view of it, I’ve got around 5 views I use heavily, and about 30 columns. I maxed out at 260 pages that had anything to do with COVID.

I’ve got all the pages organized by status, public health subject, and reopening subject. And I have a Google Doc for almost each one.

Every time there’s an announcement on reopening, or some other public health guidance change, I can quickly find which pages I need to update.

If I need stakeholder approval, I can send them the Google Doc and tell them to make comments or suggestions.

Know your source materials

Another thing you have to do is know your source materials. What led everything was the health order. Written by the City Attorneys and the health officer, it told everyone in San Francisco, this is what you have to do. This is the legal bible of what is allowed and what is not allowed.

We also had public health guidance, written by doctors. Not quite a legal bible, but had lots of information about what you should do to stay safe.

Now, there was a time early on, where I was reading everything. Health Orders, directives, guidances, FAQs. That’s when everything was closing!

Turns out, it’s much harder to reopen businesses, given the specific public health guidelines for each one.

But it’s still important to know what each one was meant for, and where it came from.

To get it done, you have to be ready to get it done.

Know your inventory inside and out.
Be familiar with your source materials.
Know your principles. Be ready to defend them. Or at least educate people on them!
Recruit some backup when things get busy.

2. Be right, or at least honest

The next principle of CERC is to be right. I don’t think I have to explain why being wrong a lot would cause people to lose trust in you!

But when working with stakeholders, there are a few more considerations: Be honest, and give context.

The CERC manual explains that to be right, that “information can include what is known, what is not known, and what is being done to fill in the gaps.”

An interesting thing about pandemic work is that it has completely cleared my ego. I really stopped worrying about how I came off, and started focusing on the work. It was all about getting the info I needed. If I didn’t know it, I’d just start asking!

Tell people what you know. And tell them what you don’t know.

Give context

It’s important to give context because all the information is just blasting at everyone all the time. Make it really clear what you want people to do.

Dispel assumptions. Give your stakeholders a heads up if something involves them. They’ll be grateful to get that intel early!

Tell them if they need to do anything. That’ll be the first question on their mind.

And tell them if there’s anything at stake, especially if you need an answer or decision right away.

With these tips, it is possible to get a handle on a runaway train with an email!

There was one time where a few teams were working on 2 projects with a similar mission. One project was a quick fix, another was a better, longer-term solution that would need lots of work.

An email chain blew up, assumptions were made, a high-up stakeholder (that I’d never talked to, of course), got wind of some parts, freaked out, and wanted to cancel everything. On a Saturday.

I was like, “Whoa, okay, time to pull back and give some context.”

I literally wrote, “Bottom line up front: I can do Webpage A on Monday, but that’s a short term solution. The longer term solution is Website B, and this is why.” And then I explained who everyone on that email chain was, why they were there, and why both projects were valid.

That high-up stakeholder replied back, thanked me for the detail, and explained that of course, no one had explained the plan to her directly. And then we proceeded to decide how to go forward.

Whew, crisis averted!

I will say that even though I write in plain language for a living, writing that email was hard! It took me hours of wracking my brain! But it’s worth doing it.

3. Be credible by knowing your limits

The third CERC principle is “Be credible.” What this means when working with stakeholders is to know your limits.

The CERC manual says, “Honesty and truthfulness should not be compromised during crises.” Sometimes that means acknowledging that you are not the best avenue to do that work.

Know how to make the most impact with the channel that you have.

In my case, I acknowledged that the SF.gov website could not do everything. It’s taken me somewhat longer to admit that I couldn’t do everything either. But that’s true too!

Leave the personal entreaties to people, not websites

One aspect of crisis communication is what we call metamessaging. That’s where you say, “Times are hard, we feel you, we get you.” Or “I know it’s hard, especially around the holidays.” It’s when you use emotion to connect to people.

Websites are not good for that. Websites are words on a page. You can’t relate to that. It comes off extremely disingenuous.

You have to have a person look you in the eye, and say it. Ideally, it would be a leader.

Luckily, Mayor London Breed was already doing it in her press conferences. And she does it very well! She explained how we all needed to do our part to tamp down the holiday surge. And we did have a holiday surge, but it could have been a lot worse.

There is absolutely nothing I could write on SF.gov that connects to people like that.

So, I let our partners do that. The mayor does the metamessaging, and community leaders would have those more intimate 1-on-1 conversations with people. “This is why you have to stay home for the holidays.” “This is why you have to wear a mask.” One on one, human to human.

What SF.gov could do was tell the general public what they could do right away. Empower people with information.

Even further, SF.gov could be used as a tool for partners and the public, to support them while they have those conversations with people they know.

4. Express empathy by acknowledging struggles

The fourth CERC principle is to express empathy. What this means for stakeholders, is to acknowledge their struggles.

The manual says, “Addressing what people are feeling, and the challenges they face, builds trust and rapport.”

They go on further to say that people don’t panic in an emergency. People react in ways that make sense to them. Always.

This is where knowing the landscape comes in handy.

Everyone you’re working with is feeling pressure that you may not know about. From above, from the sides, from the bottom. Who knows!

To get stuff done, you have to work with that. Know that everyone has their own goal. Tap into that. You want something, I want something. Here’s how we can get there together.

Make it a win/win.

And really, keep in mind that it’s not about you. Everyone is stressed out!

Help everyone embrace the chaos

This is especially helpful when new people get tossed in the fray. Just acknowledge that things suck! Help them embrace the chaos!

Most folks in my regular Digital Services team were not directly part of the COVID response work. And then a good chunk of the team was pulled into vaccines. It was the first time that most of them experienced the frantic pace of changing priorities and information. Constantly pivoting, even when you’re trying to work in a proper sprint, can be overwhelming.

I kept on telling them, “You gotta embrace the chaos! It’s the only way I’ve survived doing this work for a year!”

Then one of our engineers added the Elmo fire gif as a Slack reacji, and I was like, “Yes! Embody the Elmo!”

So anytime we get a new piece of information that completely blows up our current plan, someone reacts with Elmo fire. We sigh a bit. And then we get to work.

Acknowledging all your struggles binds people together. You can show some vulnerability right away. The psychological safety that builds up will only make you more impactful.

5. Promote action by giving people options

The fifth CERC principle is to promote action. When working with stakeholders, this can mean giving them options.

The CERC manual says “Giving people meaningful things to do calms anxiety, helps restore order, and promotes some sense of control.”

When people are stressed out, the loss of control is the scariest feeling. So you always have to give them a path. Another thing I’ve found is that if I say if I can’t do it on SF.gov, they’ll often choose another option that is not as accessible or user friendly.

But you can delegate. If you know there’s another team doing something similar, make those introductions. Again, knowing the landscape is super important!

You can also offer compromises and win/win situations. The proposed content may not fit exactly into our strict content standards on SF.gov, but if we can nudge it that way, that’s still huge progress.

That goes back into knowing your tools. I had to know what SF.gov could do. I had to know what content types we had, their goals, what they were good for, and what their limitations were.

So when someone comes in with a solution or website copy for me to publish verbatim, I can go, “Hmm, well it won’t work quite the way you envision it, but here’s what I can do. It will be more readable, accessible, user-centered, all that good stuff.”

Everybody wins!

6. Show respect

The last CERC principle is to show respect. When working with stakeholders, this means acknowledging their expertise, keeping people updated, and asking for help.

The CERC manual says “Respectful communication is particularly important when people feel vulnerable. It promotes cooperation and rapport.”

Even in a crisis, people don’t want to be treated as if they don’t have autonomy.

Acknowledge others’ expertise

You have to work with everybody. It’s not about you necessarily being an expert in that exact subject. Everyone is an expert in their own field. That’s why they’re there.

You’re “translating” other people’s work to empower the public. They have a message they want to share. My job was to help them spread that message. I studied behavior change and emergency communications, not the details of how aerosols work.

Keep everyone updated

Another thing that the pandemic taught me, was to not be afraid to keep everyone updated on everything. Before, I’d be nervous about flooding someone’s inbox.

But really, it’s a lot better to have a message unread in someone’s inbox, but there (and therefore their responsibility), than having it be your fault they didn’t find out about something.

So, keep those lines of communication open. Keep people updated. Learn what they prefer. I have Slack, Teams, and Mail open pretty much all the time. And then some stakeholders, you can only reach quickly with a text message or phone call.

And if you’re unsure, just CC everyone!

Ask for help

Last, but surely not least, is asking for help. I’m still working on this, slowly but surely. It’s really the only way to scale.

What has been working for me so far, is bringing stakeholders directly into the process. Pair-write with them, even if it’s sending Google Docs back and forth.

Mentor. They’ll have questions about why you have the principles you have. They’re not trying to be annoying, they genuinely want to be a part of what you’re part of.

Give feedback. If they don’t know what they can improve on and why, they won’t improve.

And have a relationship with your stakeholders. It doesn’t stop with training. It takes time! You can learn all about content design principles but the only way to really learn it, is to do it. And then they’ll need help.

Again, we’re still working on this, but we’ve gotten a few allies in the public health department who write the long guidance. They know their PDF guidance can be more readable, they just don’t know how to do it. But welcoming them with SF.gov content principles means that they can start improving their own content right now.

The most important thing to remember is that everyone wants to make a difference. That’s why they’re there!

Conclusion: Work with stakeholders to elevate content design

So, here we are, at the end of the 6 principles of CERC, and how they can help you work with stakeholders to elevate content design.

Be first. Know the landscape. Get it done.
Be right. Be honest, and give context.
Be credible. Know your limits.
Express empathy. Acknowledge their struggles.
Promote action. Give them options.
Show respect. Acknowledge their expertise, keep people updated, and ask for help

How is it working so far?

SF.gov is now understood to be the destination for the general public on everything COVID-19. One of the most gratifying things in doing this work, is seeing strangers, reporters even, use content I wrote to help each other. People helping each other understand what masks to use, and how to have safer holidays. Helping each other understand vaccine eligibility.

Most importantly, I’ve gotten to be a part of making real impact.

Dr. Bob Wachter’s COVID chronicles on Twitter have been a constant source of hope when things were not looking great. And in March 2021, he calculated that if the US mirrored SF’s COVID mortality rate, more than 364,000 Americans would still be alive. (As of July 2021, that number is more than 400,000.) That is staggering.

What else can we do when we elevate content design? The mind boggles. I believe that using content design and crisis comms together, we can scale our work in magnitudes.

Plain Language Summit 2020 - Day 2

2020-10-28T00:00:00Z

These are the day 2 talks I could attend. I couldn’t make it on Day 1 because it was Health Order Update Day. (Those in COVID response know... 😬)

But you can look at the slides and videos yourself on Digital.gov’s webpage about the event!

Motivate and mobilize people for change with Bethany Blakey

Original thread on Twitter

Got my coffee ☕️ and I’m READY for an early (for the west coast) 3rd session with Bethany Blakey on motivating and mobilizing people with plain language. TL;DR, it’s about STORY, of course!

“Make it easier for your audience to make the choice.” Nudge them, although definitely only use this for good!

The Post-Its I have on my monitor while doing COVID response work:

BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front)
Explain
Options/Tradeoffs
Acknowledge ❤️ and 😱

The Post-Its, and a stuffed Pusheen because we all need joy in these times!

Content strategy (vs tactics) with Ginny Redish

Original thread on Twitter

Doing an audit is not strategy. You can only properly do an audit if you have a strategy! “You have to know what you’re trying to achieve.”

Turning legalese into plain language is not the win. The win is when you help your users achieve their goals. 🙌

Sensemaking lessons from the private sector with Abby Covert

Original thread on Twitter

Lean into complexity—the superpower of IAs and the plain language community is by managing complexity! Detective work is needed.🕵🏻‍♀️ Understand all the contexts.

“Where there are people, there is complexity.” Too real! (If you don’t get that, you might be stuck in a revision spiral, or worse, miss opportunities and waste efforts!)

Interview your stakeholders! Set boundaries—let them know what’s expected (talk about their experience, keep things in confidence). Lean on a script as a goalpost. Plan a question flow to build trust.

Trust-building flow:

Position: Questions that explore the stakeholders’ position in relation to the subject being explored in the interview.
Beliefs: Questions that push to explore the things the stakeholder believes to be true as it relates to the subject being explored.
Doubts: Questions that push the stakeholder to explore the things that make them less comfortable in the subject being explored.
Color: Questions that you feel they are uniquely positioned to answer given their background, experience, and/or answers to the above.

I thought I already had a pretty good idea of what kind of people (i.e., people who “hold a stake”) to talk to, but Abby has a list, of course! Listen and take your own notes, transcripts not enough. It will take time, 3x as much as you think just to interview.

Find the people who:

Could change the course of your project mid-stream
Sign off on your work or the work of your partners
Will help you make the thing you are making
Market the thing you are making
Measure the success of the thing you are making
Maintain the thing you are making
Translate/interpret/adapt the thing you are making
Provide customer service on the thing you are making

Make sure people are working from the same maps. Get everyone together to create one together.

Since people equal complexity, you also have to document the bounds of the problem space. What can you control, influence, or consider risks of?

“Spreadsheets are my love language.” (Saaaame!)

I commiserate so much with this. Split up your audits instead of doing it all at once, like by context, user type, and channels.

Abby points out that in sensemaking, it’s people all the way down! Be kind and brave—always ask a question. You’ll always learn a lot, even if you think you know! And make sure to define what “enough” is, and defend it.

Always pay it forward. “Be clarity for those drowning in ambiguity.” Make the world a better place! 😄

Oops, “it depends” often comes across as “there is no hope” to our stakeholders! Say “goodbye confusion” (Japanese translation of “Make Sense of Any Mess”) instead of adding to it!

Q&A time! Doing all your stakeholder interviews and THEN facilitating a workshop with everyone means you (as the facilitator) see all the contradictions and understand the context.

And of course Abby already has her talk script online.

How smart teams create and train writers by Scott Kubie

Original thread on Twitter

Scott Kubie begins his session by reminding us that “there’s more to writing than just writing.” Tips from his 12 years of teaching writing, here we go!

Remember that writing is scary! Lots of people have bad memories of it from school. We have to unlearn that.

The “how” to write precedes the “what” to write. People need guidance about the mechanics of writing a certain type of content, so they know where to start.

Scott’s framework for writing:

Prepare (set goals)
Compose (“the writing”)
Edit (put on a different hat for this)
Finish (QA, legal review, adding links, what’s going to happen after they draft)

Garbage in is garbage out. (For real. SF.gov’s COVID content makes sense because the public health guidance makes sense! I can’t make 💩 not-💩!)

Tools beat rules. Rules are good and fine, but how are you helping people apply it to their writing? (Make it easy for people to do the right thing, and hard to do the wrong thing!)

Jargon is jargon! (Including “plain language.” Explain what you mean!)

A tip for training writing to subject matter experts: Even Einstein had to learn to tie his shoes! As a power user, you may be using tools that not everyone knows about. Share tips that people might find helpful, even maybe (gasp!) fun!

Tours are not the same as training! Just showing people where stuff is not nearly enough. Look as far ahead as you need to, book some actual trainings for people.

To help people start writing, Scott reminds us that “stealing is natural.” Even for yourself—helps in the preparation step! Although it’s yet another fear we have to unlearn from school! Most writing for government, business, UX, etc, don’t need to be original.

Fidelity is freeing. Make it clear if someone is working with “low fidelity” text (i.e. first drafts) and incorporate the culture that writing takes work. Can use colors or fonts (yup, Comic Sans!).

Remind people that “good writing works.” Avoid an unbalanced focus on grammar perfection. Get it out and helping people ASAP!

Crits are critical. Talk about content goals, then workshop it together. That’s a massive training and educational opportunity! Scott says he leaves 1 hour per week for content crits. (I admittedly don’t do this enough because COVID content is ASAP! 🙁)

Remember that people want to help! Gatekeeping means missed opportunities for trust and learning.

All the (amazingly illustrated) tips about writer training from Scott Kubie, all together!

LOL Scott drops a “I like FAQs” zinger right before his session ends! 😂

World IA Day SF 2020 notes

2020-02-22T00:00:00Z

Elemental: Or, how IA makes us smarter by Jorge Arango

Original thread on Twitter

Time to hear from the IA master Jorge Arango, talking about how IA makes us smarter!

Jorge points out the periodic table was designed by Dmitri Mendeleev. These substances did not arrange themselves magically! Listing known elements by atomic weight didn’t take into account all characteristics, nor unknown elements. It took a lot of iteration.

At first, ancient humans thought there were only 4 elements: earth, fire, air, and water. Developing it into the periodic table has been a process, and showed our gaps in knowledge. “The need to understand is deeply human.”

Language: An IA Element

“We set boundaries through words.” It sets our cultures, norms, and institutions. Language skills matter more than ever.

Jorge quotes Andrew Hinton about language being to humans like water is to fish. We are so immersed in it, we almost take it for granted. He suggests learning a second language to appreciate language once more.

The power of language is that it defines something in the world that we can discuss. But we have to remember that language is a reduction and abstraction. It is not the world. IAs have to try extra hard to see what is really there.

Distinction: An IA element

No distinctions are real, but we experience them through language. We have to be careful when talking about differences.

When you aren’t given an option to distinguish whether you hate something, you might choose something else to substitute. (why @jarango can’t trust “curious” reactions on LinkedIn anymore!)

People can latch to differences and distinctions, making it difficult to truly understand. Reality is never black and white.

Relationships: An IA element

By labeling distinctions, we create new relationships between them.

Jorge says information is anything that reduces uncertainty, and helps predict. The periodic table did that, because it explained elemental relationships and even predict elements that hadn’t been discovered yet.

But when creating new relationships, we can destroy the original meaning. The term “news feed” on Facebook has diluted the meaning of news re: journalism. Design skirts being Orwellian if we aren’t careful.

Rules: An IA element

We have to explain why certain configurations exist. There has to be a method to the madness. That allows us to be more certain of our predictions.

The roads show you where you can drive. The links on a webpage show you what you can click on. That’s a lot of power. All taxonomies are political. “IAs have to have their values straight, and we have to be politically savvy.”

IAs must design the systems that produce and manage structures, not just the structures themselves. “We’re not designing walls, but the trellis on which other things will grow.” It’s not just governance, it’s stewardship.

The complete IA Elements, according to Jorge Arango! Language, distinctions, relationships, rules.

Jorge points out that Mendeleev was not an IA, he was a chemist. IA is everywhere. We all have to do IA now, to help make sense of the world.

My talk about using IA in writing the cannabis business permit application

Photo by Michael Haggerty-Villa

I was a bit 😱 I would be the sole speaker after Jorge, but our talks actually worked out well! Jorge’s was high level and inspiring (which I love about many talks at The IA Conference) and mine was “ok here’s how you actually make it work!” 😄 Both types are valuable!

Read the transcript, although the super TL;DR takeaways:

IA tools and principles can help convert policies into something usable for the public
IA principles can be used for deliverables outside of sitemaps and wireframes, like content design
Where there’s any information at all, there IA is

Rizwan Javaid’s workshop on sketching

I forgot what a frog looks like...

On hiring, first impressions from the other side

2019-12-13T00:00:00Z

I just finished a round of hiring for the first time! Here are things I personally have learned, for those of you applying for jobs. Keep in mind that since my team is so small and we have no money for recruiters, I was the one doing resume screens, phone screens, and panel interviews, and these are things that jumped out at me seeing this from the other side for the first time.

Cover letters are nice but most of them are far too long! 😅 Just 1-2 paragraphs, please.
Have some experience on your resume that’s at least somewhat congruent with what the job description asks for. I got a lot of graphic design and branding resumes (and a few memorable YouTuber and TV producer resumes), when we were looking for someone who focuses on content strategy and content design.
Years of experience don’t always matter (unfortunately in government they matter). But if we’re asking for 2+ years of experience working with stakeholders, someone right out of college is not going to pass the resume screen.
Do not show weak stuff in the field you’re applying for. If we’re asking for someone who writes well, we WILL NOT pass anyone with typos ANYWHERE. Sorry, but that’s a nonstarter. It is absolutely shocking how people with good experience we had to reject because they had too many typos. (Yes, more than 1!) We just can’t send those people out to our stakeholders if they’re this careless.
Focus on your strengths (i.e. “do not show weak stuff at all, part deux”). You sometimes don’t know who will be on a panel interview. The job we were hiring for is not strictly visual design, but the design director was on these panel interviews. If you show us your bad visual design in hopes of impressing us with your scope of (vast but mediocre) abilities….that’s still a no. Again, we can’t send those people out to our stakeholders if they show bad judgement in what to focus on.
Related, but stick to a narrative and don’t meander. This wasn’t as much as a problem for us (since we’re content and people generally know how to communicate) but some coworkers interviewing for dev roles would get people who would go off on a tangent for 10+ minutes on the phone screen! Immediate reject—our time is precious and we can’t dawdle during meetings.
Know what’s important to the org you’re applying for. If anyone did any research of my team, it would be clear that accessibility is SUPER important to us. Therefore, mention it as important to you, or at least that you’re aware of it. And do not show work that has poor color contrast (i.e. poor accessibility). And choose your case studies carefully. Super capitalist/corporate/anti-environment case studies were very awkward to sit through! 😅

AIGA SF UX Year in Review for 2019

2019-12-04T00:00:00Z

Designing Adobe XD with Ainsley Wagoner

Original thread on Twitter

First up is Ainsley Wagoner to talk about her work with Adobe XD. It’s easy to add new features but it’s really about the workflow.

Being able to design robust states was important. Designers would want to design hover states, group break points, artboard break points. They had to have animation and reusability.

(This presentation mostly makes me glad I don’t work primarily in visual design tools anymore. 😅)

Food systems at Julie Sanduski’s Adobe Creative Residency

Original thread on Twitter

Next is Julie Sanduski about circularity in food systems at her Adobe Creative Residency. Outcomes of a technical cycle in order of maintenance of the original: reusing, refurbishing, remanufacturing, and recycling.

Visually depicting waste economy, recycling economy, and circular economy.

Julie was interested in food because you have to use it or you lose it. 43% of food waste happens at home! Some factors involve being optimistic about what you’ll eat or cook, and what you’ll share. Some people also feel guilty about throwing it away.

If we share food more, we’ll likely waste less of it. Julie designed an app to find hyper local neighbors to share food with. You can meet others, pick up food, request an ingredient, or share yours.

The Requests screen resembles an ecommerce experience, but in reverse.

Julie encourages all of us to use sustainability as a catalyst for innovation. “We don’t know what the future holds, but we can create it!”

Accessibility in Adobe XD by Julian Crespo

Original thread on Twitter

Next is Julian Crespo to talk about accessibility in Adobe XD. He worked on a plug-in....but how to do that with native screenreaders??

Only 1% of websites out there are fully accessible. 85% of the problems are color contrast problems. And there are 1 billion users of assistive technologies out there.

The cost of not being accessible is growing, with a 177% increase of lawsuits. But we shouldn’t have to depend on the fear of litigation to do the right thing!

Documenting accessibility has to be done manually, which is a slog for designers. Implementing accessibility is also not part of the normal workflow for devs either. Julian went to San Francisco LightHouse for the Blind to see how blind people would actually use the web.

Blind users told Julian that when designers got fancy, that’s when the web became inaccessible! They were very dubious about design in general because of that. It was taking away their abilities.

Julian created the Adobe XD plugin AllY (pronounced “ally” but also a11y like “accessibility” heh). It helps designers with color contrast, focus states, and ARIA roles. 🙌🏽 And it spits out a design spec automatically. Yay for democratizing accessible design! The more tools to help designers and devs do the right thing, the better off we’ll be!

Navigating Ambiguity with Nisa Andrews

Original thread on Twitter

Last is Nisa Andrews to talk about ambiguity in design! Ambiguity is mostly about feelings. And it’s not just about work—who you are at work is also who you are at home. “Wherever you go, there you are.”

Ambiguity often means you’re making your own path!

You have to do some deep work in ambiguous situations. What does trust, safety, and change mean for you?

Ways to deal with ambiguity: managing expectations, being ok with the possibility that things will go wrong, and looking within yourself to ask what’s bothersome. We’re all designing in quicksand, and we have to be ok with that. (Personal note: If you want to really work in ambiguity, try working in government. 😅😄🥳 We’re creating something new every day!)

Frustration + surprise = anger
Frustration + expectation = sadness

The School of Life

Pursue an adventurous self-inquiry:

How do you react when things don’t go as expected?
What do you do when there is an unclear path forward?
How do you feel when you ask for help?
Bonus: Where do these feelings come from? Have you experienced them before in a different context?

Panel with speakers

Wheeee this panel is also talking about storytelling! Julie and Julian both say that storytelling is super important for their work.

Julian recommends the podcast Hidden Brain and the book Sapiens. Learn about fellow humans, and the story of us!

Making content user-centered at San Francisco Digital Services

2019-10-04T00:00:00Z

Content on government sites need a lot of work! San Francisco is no different. Digital Services is working hard making content as accessible and user-centered as possible.

We’re handling it all between 2 content designers, and we need more help. We’re looking for a senior content strategist right now, and will post 2 content designer jobs later in the year.

We need to recruit for a movement.

Digital Services designs content first

We sit on the design team. Before any mockups are done, we work together on figuring out what content needs to be where.

We make sure at least 1 content person participates in all design feedback sessions and product meetings.

We help design better services

Our content work is not just microcopy, limited to individual screens. Our work is a combination of information architecture, content strategy, and UX writing. We help residents succeed in complex processes like buying a home or applying for a cannabis permit.

We help departments understand what it means to be user-centered

The bulk of our work is in reframing our stakeholders’ understanding of their own services. We run workshops to create user stories and get buy in.

Fire department PIO Lt. Jonathan Baxter with SFDS content designer Anita Cheng, posing in front of a wall of stickies after a successful user needs workshop.

We write new user-centered services with subject matter experts. Then we train content leads at the departments to own their own content.

Learn what one City department’s experience was like.

We are still figuring out what content work looks like in the City

We are less than a year into moving department services onto SF.gov. Everything’s still pretty new. We iterate on each workshop, migration, and training session.

We refer to how other government entities have handled content.GOV.UK, 18F, and federal plain language resources are all fair game.

We’re also still working on our content standards, striving for 5th grade reading level if at all possible. Check out our working content style guide. (We’ll need your help filling that out too!)

Join us!

We’re currently hiring content people. See our jobs page.

You can also sign up for our mailing list. We’ll let you know of any upcoming roles we have.

Read more about the work we’re doing, our principles, and more about the team.

Unexpected lessons from my mom

2019-02-17T00:00:00Z

The following is the eulogy I gave at my mom’s memorial, in a chapel surrounded by her quilts.

I would not be standing here, speaking to all of you wonderful people today, if it wasn’t for my mom. Not because of the obvious reason, but because during my childhood, I had a severe stutter. Speaking in front of anyone at all was out of the question.

In high school, I did a course called the McGuire Program. It involved four 8-hour days of intensive speech practice at a hotel in Reno. I was by far the youngest person there. And Mom was with me the entire time. She was there on my first day, where it took me almost an entire minute to introduce myself.

And she was there on my last day, when we each gave an impromptu speech in front of a crowd at the mall. I will never forget her face after I finished.

Through joyful tears, she gathered me into her arms right after I stepped off the podium. In her eyes, I had finally proved to myself that I could reach my potential. The potential that she saw but I hadn’t realized yet.

That was one of the first big lessons I learned from Mom: Be your own best.

She used to tell us when we were in school: “No matter how smart you think you are, there’s always someone in the world smarter than you.” I think she meant to keep us humble, but I took that to mean it was okay to be a little lazy.

Getting an 89.5—still an A! Lynbrook High School grads know what I’m talking about.

I think it frustrated her that I was like this, but it wasn’t until much later that I realized the real value of that lesson.

Grades or test scores, or any other arbitrary standard, don’t define your worth. And they don’t define your potential.

Mom taught us to always do our best. Not because we could be #1, but because otherwise, it’s not worth doing at all. She was a great role model herself, taking on new activities and continually developing her skills, as you can see for yourself, all around this room. She didn't get into quilting until she retired.

She put us both in piano, not because we could win competitions or pass a bunch of tests. But because in her words, “we would have something to do when we were retired.” I was 10 years old when she told me this.

It was about learning a skill that would allow us to enjoy life.

That was a motto she had, especially as we got older. Don’t forget to enjoy life!

Learning was such a huge part of her joy. There were always so many new things to learn, all the time.

Which goes into the second big lesson I learned from Mom: You can always learn something from everyone you meet.

A new skill, a new perspective. How exciting!

That openness and generosity was the key to Mom’s kindness. You can see proof of that love reflected back all around this room. She has friends from school, friends from work, friends from her retirement years volunteering. People from vastly different backgrounds throughout the decades, gathered here to celebrate her.

I’ve taken that lesson with me, especially during my career change. From cancer research to design, if it’s been a while since you’ve gotten an update on our antics.

Showing openness and generosity to my new professional community has opened doors and has found me doing work I never could have imagined.

Mom’s openness about life also leads me to the third big lesson I learned from her: You can always learn something from every experience. Yes, even awful ones.

The past few weeks with Mom’s illness were so hard, but in the struggle, I’ve realized the true bond of sisterhood. Three pairs of sisters: mom’s sister Yi-Wen, me and my sister Diane, and mom’s cousins Vera and Joanna. Together, we formed a team around Mom and made sure every one of her last wishes were fulfilled.

Sisters take care of each other. And we get stuff done. We’ve got the text messages, emails, spreadsheets, and 30 pages in Google Docs to prove it! Thank you so much to my sisterhood. I have no idea how we could have done it all without each other.

These lessons, among others, were all small when first given to me, like tiny seeds. But they have grown to make me the person I am today.

That was always Mom’s way. Planting tiny seeds, instead of coming right out with big gestures. She was always very unassuming and humble. But seeds can always grow.

These tiny seeds, of love, of generosity, of support, have all grown. We are all here today to give some of that love back.

I sign off with what Mom always used to tell me before we would say good night to each other on Google Hangouts. Be good, and enjoy your life.

Thank you.

Love, Ni Ni

How to change your career if you are short on money, time, and energy

2018-12-31T00:00:00Z

Did you know what you wanted to do with your life at 22? Neither did I!

I had graduated with a hard science major, looking forward to a career mostly working alone and with my hands. I wanted to avoid “office politics,” and avoid writing. (I thought I wasn’t good at writing; I had gotten a better score on the SAT math section than the writing section.)

I thought that’s what I wanted. But a few years into that, I wanted more for myself.

Now I’m designing and writing content to empower residents in one of the most innovative cities in the world. I’m working with amazing people, collaborating across multiple agencies and stakeholders.

Looking back on my experience to help others

I recently started my third position in that new career, 5 years after quitting my original path. The time has given me some perspective, but I still remember what it was like.

I hope this helps those who are looking at their current job and thinking, “Is this all for me? Do I dare to dream for more?”

The answer is, of course, yes!

So…you’ll still have to work

First things first. I kind of lied with that clickbaity headline. (Sorry!)

Changing your career will require time, it will require energy, and it often requires some money.

But had I listened to people who said career changers had to:

hit up networking events to meet everyone, multiple times a week
freelance after a full 8-hour day job, until 2am every night
quit their job to do a 10-week $15,000 bootcamp
quit their job to get a $50,000 2-year master’s degree

…I wouldn’t have started at all!

I did none of those things. Granted, it was a journey that took years for me. But I made it, with a solid path, zero debt, and with my chill demeanor intact.

Be efficient and effective

I knew my limits. I knew I wasn’t an extroverted, hyper-achieving Type-A person. And I was adamant about not squeezing myself into a box that didn’t fit me.

I had to be efficient and effective. If you aren’t a naturally extroverted, hyper-achieving Type-A person, you’ll need to do the same.

You’ll have to know yourself. And you’ll have to carefully consider your options against your needs.

It sounds like a lot of work, and yes, it’s a lot of research and thinking. But it’s better than flailing around, trying expensive and time-consuming paths that may not be right for you.

Remember, you are a person, not a set of skills

When switching careers, you may believe that you’ll need to catch up to everyone else who started straight out of college. You can spend months or even years trying to “learn everything.”

Well here’s the hard truth: You won’t. Someone else’s years of education and work experience can’t be easily dismissed.

But that doesn’t mean your resume will always be put aside in favor of theirs.

You are more than a set of skills. You are a person. You have experience that non-career-changers don’t, since you came from somewhere else. You can leverage that.

First, know thyself

The more you know yourself, the better prepared you’ll be to tackle the decisions you’ll have to make. And there will be a lot of them!

The very first one, and perhaps the most important, is figuring out what you should do.

Find your new goal

It’s easy to get excited over a new trendy or lucrative field. But before you commit, make sure it’s right for you.

Figure out your lifelong motivating theme

If you are switching from another career, there’s no need to erase your previous life. You can use it to set your future direction and present a unique narrative.

Cancer research and UX design don’t seem any way related. But ever since I was a kid, I loved taking useful notes. I loved being able to help my classmates who had been out sick. “No worries, you can copy my notes!” Yup, I am one proud nerd.

Taking good notes sure was useful in my lab job! My boss was able to refer to my lab notes years after I’d left. It even manifests now in my live-tweeting of design events. Even if you aren’t there, you can learn something from what I write.

I may not be the originator of the story, idea, or policy. But I’ve always aimed to translate it for as many people as I can. That’s essentially what I do today.

What is the motivation behind something you naturally do, even just for fun? What about it is translatable to a new career?

Find a passion

To sustain energy and drive for this career change and beyond, you have to find what you really like doing. For hours on end, even if it’s hard.

I believe everyone has something like this. For me, it wasn’t my original major. Not even close.

It was something I came upon completely by accident. Out of extreme Batman fandom, I wanted to build a large online archive. Instead of just dreaming about it, I took it upon myself to design and build it. After a year of work, I still loved doing (almost) everything about it, so I figured I should do it for a job! 🙂

If you really like doing something, pursue it! See where it takes you. It doesn’t have to translate directly into a job. But things will be a lot easier if you enjoy your new career.

Check things out

Finding something you like is important. But so will making sure you’ll like the day-to-day.

Before I discovered UX, I thought I could combine my talents for art and science into medical illustration. I looked seriously into applying for medical illustration programs.

Then I contacted several working medical illustrators, asking to job shadow them for an hour. Turns out the day-to-day was quite different from the creative artistry I believed it would be.

One illustrator was spending that day digitally painting blood vessels on eyeballs for surgical training software. The other was camped out in Adobe Illustrator, drawing spheres of various sizes and gradients. She told me that’s where all the money was—drawing spheres to depict molecular processes.

I wanted more creativity and autonomy than that. So I closed the door on medical illustration. Sure, I had already put a lot of time and effort into art classes, but at least I figured it out before going for the expensive certificate programs!

Before you get too excited, do a little research or try a small real-world project on your own. Make sure you like the day-to-day before going much further.

Figure out what you need

Once you’ve chosen what direction to go towards, it’s time to decide which path to take.

It’s easy to choose the path that seems straightforward, or claims to guarantee you a job. Be wary—industries change and things may not be all they seem.

It’s hard enough for young recent grads to follow the path they’re supposed to: degree, internships, more degrees, junior roles, etc. Career changers have even less options. You’ll have to get creative.

Do you really need a degree?

Very few jobs absolutely require that you have a related degree or certification. Medical doctor, lawyer, some vocational trades. But very few do. Certainly not tech jobs, for one.

School, especially in the US, is very expensive. Lenders will quite happily lend you tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars for a degree. Then they expect you to pay it all back whether you have a well-paying job or not.

For UX, many design bootcamp graduates have the same portfolio and seem to think the same way. How is a hiring manager supposed to differentiate between grads from the same class if this is the case? The grads end up doing more work on top of the expensive education. They have to prove that they are more than the schooling they got.

Ask yourself, what difference does that degree make? If you want to go to school, focus on the things you’ll learn. Don’t make decisions from the assumed legitimacy of the degree.

Cobbling together an education

Once I had decided on UX, I looked at my options. I wanted to keep my full-time job since I didn’t want the financial stress. The following were out:

(another) bachelor’s degree, in design
full-time bootcamp
full-time master’s degree

Those were the most obvious routes. What was left? I did some research, and found that there were certificate programs I could do part-time at state and community colleges.

I knew I needed to shore up my visual design skills. Lucky for me, I lived close to both ArtCenter College of Design and Pasadena City College (PCC). A few instructors taught at both. I could get ArtCenter education while paying community college prices!

Despite it being a community college education, I pushed myself creatively as far as I could. The instructors, seeing my drive, pushed me further as well. I’m still not the best visual designer, but the education gave me a solid foundation to work with.

After a few freelance gigs, I felt that I was still lacking in specific UX skills. Mostly user research methods, but I also wanted more rigorous training in wireframing and business. By that time, I had networked enough to hear about the Cal State Fullerton UX certificate program from multiple senior designers. It was for working professionals since it was on Saturdays only. The curriculum seemed like it would give me a good foundation about how to think as a UXer.

I signed up, and was surprised at how many working UXers were in my class, looking to get more rigorous training themselves. You bet I learned from them too!

All in all, I finished my UX education before I quit my lab job to pursue UX full-time.

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Figure out what’s best for you and your situation.

Prove you can do the work

Whether you decide to get a formal education or not, the most important thing is proving you can do the work. That’s what it takes to convince someone to hire you. Having years of experience or lots of degrees are merely shorthand of proving you can do the work.

Sometimes just that degree is enough. Usually, it isn’t.

Proving you can do the work can be:

having an impressive resume with famous companies and degrees
writing compelling case studies of anything you’ve done, including school and personal projects
having data that shows you moved the needle for clients

If you don’t have degrees or famous companies on your resume, there are still other options!

Start small and be scrappy

It’s a catch–22: to get a job, you need experience. But to get experience, you need a job!

Or do you?

The whole point of “having experience” is being able to apply what you know.

Personal projects are experience. Side projects are experience. Freelance gigs are experience. Build up on everything you do, collect measurements, and soon you’ll be too impactful to ignore!

I started my UX journey on a personal project where I learned everything I needed to launch a website: UX, design, content, code, SEO, hosting. I learned as I went, and only when it was needed.

I used that knowledge for my first paying website job through a friend of a friend. (Referrals work!) The requirements weren’t a huge jump from what I was familiar with. Neither was the next freelance gig, nor the next one. Each was a gradual, but unmistakable, stepping stone.

I collected impact measurements, such as registration rates and sales. I wrote each of the projects a descriptive case study. It was clear from my work that I knew what I was doing.

You don’t have to go big at first. Start small, and log how you made a difference. Don’t wait for permission to make an impact.

Redefine luck

Your own education, and how you prove you can do the work, that’s all up to you. You control all of that. You call all the shots.

But there’s going to be a lot of factors affecting your journey that have nothing to do with you. Most people would consider that luck. They think all of it is out of your hands.

I disagree.

Luck = Preparation + Opportunity

Yes, luck does have an aspect of random opportunity to it. But if you’re not prepared to take advantage of it, you won’t be lucky.

After I quit academic research, it took me more than a year to land my first full-time job in UX.

At last, a random recruiter found me on Dice for a position at the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety. One that supposedly required 5+ years of experience.

No matter. I examined the job description and prepared for the interview accordingly. (I wrote another blog post about exactly how I did that.) And I got the job!

It was chance that the recruiter came upon my Dice profile. But if I hadn’t worked diligently on my resume or portfolio, him finding me wouldn’t have made a difference. I had to be ready for the opportunity to take advantage of it.

There are ways to improve your chances that luck will find you.

“Preparation” also means preparing to wait

If you want to make the most of your opportunities, you have to give yourself mental space and some financial runway. I had the luxury of waiting until the right opportunity came along, because I had diligently saved from my previous career.

I’ve had designer peers who think it’ll take them a month or two to find a new gig. Sometimes that happens, but sometimes it takes much longer. You don’t want to find yourself in a place where you feel you have to take anything, in order to pay the bills.

Financial stress should not be taken lightly. It causes people to make bad decisions.

Of course it’s possible to change your career when you’re financially strapped. But it will be more stressful. And stress makes the journey all the more difficult.

Give yourself some financial runway, so you can have room to think.

When you find a foothold, dig in!

A nice way saying it is “bloom where you’re planted” but I’m not being delicate here. It’s more like taking root in a crack in the concrete and buckling the sidewalk.

Whatever opportunity you do get, dig in!

I didn’t scoff at the small freelance gigs I was getting at first. I used each as an opportunity to learn something new and to make an impact.

Finally having a full-time UX job didn’t mean resting on my laurels. It meant finding opportunities to make my colleagues’ lives easier. It meant building a community in the government space, so I could do my job better and help others.

Make it so that people will miss you when you leave.

(There is usually panic and some wailing, in my case. Very sweet, but also a little awkward!)

Find your tribe

You’re going to need all the help you can get, from people around you.

I couldn’t have gotten into UX without the help from my first boss, at the cancer research lab. He had absolutely no reason to help me leave science to do something else.

But he allowed me to do experiments at night, so I could attend design classes at PCC during the day. I learned how to build my first website during downtime between experiments.

He believed that as a boss, his job was to help us however we needed. But he couldn’t have helped if I hadn’t asked.

Some people won’t be supportive. But you won’t know for sure unless you ask.

Finding your tribe also means networking and meeting new people. Or as I like to say, making friends in your new industry! (I’ve written a separate blog post about how to network as an introvert.)

Even if you’re shy or you think you won’t be good at it, knowing folks in your industry comes in very handy.

The only job I fell into randomly was my first. My subsequent roles were found for me through people I knew. Building a network sounds like a lot of work, and it is! But it’s an investment that will easily pay for itself several times over.

I can’t imagine applying for a job cold now. I’d try my networks first.

If you look out for people, they’ll look out for you.

Get rid of toxicity

The flip side of finding your tribe, is to minimize your exposure to things that will hold you back. That includes people.

It’ll take enough of your energy to learn the things you need to learn. You don’t need to have your energy sapped by that well-meaning relative who insists that your path isn’t going to work every time they see you.

I am lucky. I have a spouse who believes in me 110%. I also have high-achieving Asian parents who trusted that I knew what was best for me. My journey would have been a lot more difficult if I hadn’t had their support.

Changing your career is hard. Getting weighed down by toxicity makes it even harder. Be ready to let go of toxic people and situations.

Believe in yourself

Cheesy, but true! Once you’ve set the stage for your career switch, it’s then about having faith in your decisions as you look for that first job.

Job searching is a long slog for everyone. But there are other considerations to keep in mind for career changers.

Own your timeline

Sometimes it may seem that everyone else is moving faster than you. It’s easy to doubt your path and follow what everyone else is doing. Don’t.

You can forge ahead with what you have. You’re on your own path.

When times are tough, remember the reasons why you’re on the path you’re on. You made methodical decisions, and that says something about you.

Your goal isn’t a job that treats you like a set of skills. Your goal is a career that’s worthy of you, with all of your contexts and values and experiences. It’s worth waiting for.

Not getting gigs doesn’t mean you are failing

During my 1+ year of UX job searching, I tried signing up for short-term gigs with staffing agencies like Vitamin T, Creative Circle, and the like. I got some good tips about writing my resume, but otherwise I got zero leads.

It seemed like everyone else was having success through these staffing agencies but me. It seemed like nobody wanted what I had to offer.

I started opening up the industries I was willing to work in. My ideal was healthcare, but I went down my list to ecommerce, which was probably my 4th choice. I was just about to apply to jobs in my “god please no” industry (ad agencies) when the government job fell into my lap. And from the success and reception I’ve found in this field, it’s where I belong.

You couldn’t have said that looking at my first year trying to apply for things! It looked like I didn’t belong anywhere and that I had made a huge mistake.

Sometimes it really is not you

Honestly, hiring is broken for many industries. The reasons that a company rejects you may have nothing to do with you. Sometimes it has to do with the maturity of the company and what they think they need.

7 months before I got my first full-time job in UX, I was rejected from a company I had hit it off with. I had done my research. I knew the users and had talked with them. I reached out to staff there and had very productive conversations with them. It still didn’t work out.

But how they rejected me was a revelation. They made it clear that it wasn’t me, it was the company. They weren’t ready for UX.

4 years later, that company has finally hired their first UXer. And I’m making an impact for all San Franciscans at SF Digital Services. I think I came out ahead!

Tell your story

Going from one industry to another is a huge part of your life. Telling that story can be a compelling way for people to remember you.

(Or hire you. I had one contract gig where I was hired because they figured, “If she could do molecular biology, she can quickly learn this big data enterprise tool we have.” Which honestly worked for me!)

When people ask me about my journey, I have one line I always say:

I quit cancer research to go into tech so I could help people faster.

That one sentence explains where I came from, and what my ultimate goals are. I’m not just checking off boxes or pursuing a salary or job title. I made purposeful decisions along this journey. How I explain those decisions says a lot about me.

The way you tell your story will say a lot about you too. Be in control of your own narrative. That may mean saying no to opportunities, which is scary! But it also means helping you find the opportunities that are a resounding “YES!” for you.

Forget job titles

Speaking of job titles, I recommend you don’t take them too seriously.

Before I changed careers, my sister and I shared the same official job title: Research Associate. I did molecular biology experiments with human cells and E. coli. She worked in public policy on student loans and college affordability. Many job titles don’t actually describe what you do.

Not only that, but you also limit yourself when you have a specific job title as a ultimate goal. You subconsciously put yourself into a box. You have to learn this, but not that. You’re supposed to be good at this thing, but not that. You should be talking to certain people, or applying for certain jobs at certain companies. But not others.

Putting yourself into a box, especially in tech, can make you less nimble for changes down the road. And they will change. My current job title didn’t exist in its current form until about 6 years ago.

Your journey is not a timeline of job titles. It’s a lot more than that. It’s about you and who you are.

It’s a never-ending journey

Even if you make it, it’s still not over. I may be 5 years into my career change, but I’m still learning every day.

I’m learning how to make a bigger impact. I’m learning how to apply what I know to other fields. I’m learning how other fields can apply to mine. And of course, I want to lend a hand to those following behind me.

So in summary, the principles of changing your career are:

Be efficient and effective
Choose your goal: Find your lifelong motivating theme, find your passion, and check things out
Choose your path: Decide if you need a degree, and prove you can do the work
Luck = Preparation + Opportunity
When you find a foothold, dig in!
Find your tribe and get rid of toxicity
Believe in yourself and tell your story

What I do in the next 5 years may be completely different than the past 5. But I’ve forged my own path, as have many others.

I believe we are all capable of transformation, given the right tools and guidance. So go forth and be awesome!

How clear content can make living in San Francisco possible

2018-11-15T00:00:00Z

In 2017, I moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco to work at the Mayor’s Office of Housing & Community Development (MOHCD). I told my friends that I was going to work on affordable housing there. I’d always append that with, “Yes, I know there is no affordable housing in San Francisco!”

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t people trying to change that.

Making San Francisco residency accessible

MOHCD is such a place. The people there envision “an equitable and diverse City where all residents can afford a place to live.”

MOHCD offers financial help for residents who need it for stable housing in the City. But offering such programs won’t make a difference if information about how to apply for it is still inaccessible.

That’s where I came in. My job at MOHCD was to restructure information on the website so our applicants could understand it.

The reality is that buying a home is just not easy!

When I arrived, MOHCD had already launched an online rental housing application. People who wanted to rent affordable apartments could apply for the lottery online. You could do it in minutes and be on your way.

Buying an apartment in a MOHCD program is not like that.

You have to go through a 6-hour workshop at an approved housing counseling agency. Then you have to meet one on one with a housing counselor to do a basic check of your finances. If you pass the basic check, you then go to a participating lender to get preapproved for a mortgage.

All that before you can even apply! If you miss any of those steps, it’s more headache for you, as well as MOHCD staff, to try to get it rectified before the lottery.

For many, the process looks so arduous that they don’t even try.

But for those who hang on, figuring which program to use can still be confusing!

Making homeownership possible for the “missing middle”

One of the programs I worked on was the Downpayment Assistance Loan Program, or DALP. It’s a loan program for people who are considered middle income. They need just a little boost for their downpayment when buying.

DALP provides a downpayment loan up to $375,000, on a market rate home in San Francisco. Every year, there is a limited amount of funds available to loan out. There is one DALP lottery every year to determine the order in which MOHCD staff go through applications.

That’s the absolute minimum you need to know to apply for DALP. And this was the original DALP page.

For those of you who work in government or have been to a government website, this kind of page looks very familiar. It’s a program page, and it shows everything anyone would ever want to know about that program. And I do mean “anyone”—applicants, lenders, policymakers, staff, and the general public.

If you wanted to apply, how would you do it? That was not clear on the original page. That had to change.

To make government services better, start with content

Why does content matter so much? It seems so…basic, doesn’t it?

Changing the way government services work is hard. It involves tearing down existing ways of working. Ways that have worked (or limped along) for years. Maybe even decades.

Once we tear down the old process, we have to replace it with a new one. And in government, once you start down one rabbit hole, you usually find 10 more to go down. It’s a transition that may take years and years. In the meantime, our residents continue to miss out on opportunities.

Language is access

Instead of changing how the process itself works, one stopgap is updating content. At least people will understand how things work, even if the process itself remains complicated.

Understanding your users’ needs is the best way to improve your content

It’s not enough to use smaller words. If information is not relevant or is presented out of context, it’s still hard to understand.

You have to know your users and what they need. And then organize your content accordingly.

San Francisco Digital Services does it by writing user stories based on real user research. Our template is from GOV.UK’s recommendation: “As a (someone), I need/want/expect to (do something), so I can (achieve some kind of criteria)”

After interviewing several homeownership applicants, I discovered that one main motivation for buying over renting was stability. People don’t want to be priced out of their home, or be evicted.

I wrote the following user story:

As a parent, I want to buy a home in San Francisco, so my children can stay in their school district.

Understand the process you’re writing about

Next, you have to learn about the thing you’re writing about. You can’t fake knowledge if your goal is to write clearly and directly. You have to know the ins and outs. Meet with subject matter experts (SMEs) to walk you through how things work.

One of the first things I did at MOHCD was to meet with each housing program manager and draw out their service on a whiteboard. I also met with them to pair-write the content together. In this case, I drafted up my ideas and then pestered the SMEs in person with questions that came up.

I told the staff, “I can’t write it if I don’t know it.” All of them were more than happy to share their knowledge and experience.

I drew out journey maps for every major service MOHCD had, and pinned them to the outside of my cubicle. It has become a reference for anyone working with MOHCD programs, to understand how it all works.

A hand-illustrated user journey about an affordable homeownership program in San Francisco.

Structure your content to reduce cognitive load

Extensive research shows that people do not read everything on a webpage. They scan, reading only 20% of what you put on a page.

Saying “They didn’t read it, it’s their fault!” won’t do any good. The result is a lose/lose for everyone. Your readers miss opportunities, and your work has made no impact. The responsibility falls to us to make our content as easy to read as possible.

Do everything you can to reduce cognitive load.

One task, process, or audience need per page

The needs of a parent applying for a loan program is very different from the needs of a mortgage lender. An applicant just needs to know enough to apply. The lender needs to know financing details.

Having information for multiple audience needs on the same page increases cognitive load. Having information on multiple processes on the same page also increases cognitive load.

Everyone has to read the whole thing and pick out what’s relevant to them right now. That’s a lot of work, and people can assume wrong.

Make the information as relevant to them as possible. If it involves more than one audience need or task or process, split it off onto a new page. People don’t need everything at once.

When restructuring DALP content, I split it into two pages. One for applicants, and one for all other audiences who needed financing details. Those would include lenders, housing counselors, and even reporters.

Use the inverted pyramid

The inverted pyramid is a concept taken from journalism. The basic premise is to assume your user will stop reading your content at any time.

That means the most important information must be presented first. If the user stopped reading after the first sentence, they should have a general idea of what the page was about.

No more “welcome” or “thank you for reading” introductions. I start every page by answering the question, “So what is this thing anyway?”

I then create sections of content, and order that section by audience size. These sections of content are informed by the original user story: “As a parent, I want to buy a home in San Francisco, so my children can stay in their school district.”

What would someone need to know, to apply for an affordable housing program?

Everyone wants to know if they’re eligible.
If they are eligible, how to fulfill application requirements.
If they are eligible and finish all requirements, apply for the program.
Some will want to know what to expect after they apply.
Very few people, if any, want to learn about the background or history of the program they’re applying for. Only if they’re real policy wonks!

The number of people who would want to read the content becomes smaller as they go down the page. That’s the idea of the inverted pyramid.

Present information where people will see it

In the quest for consistency, many people try to decrease repeated information. This can be confusing for readers who are scanning. It’s best to give them relevant information at the point where they’ll see it, even if it’s repetitive.

For all MOHCD homeownership programs, everyone needs to go to a workshop, meet with a housing counselor, and get a mortgage preapproval letter. It’s not technically a step to apply for DALP, because it’s assumed that you would already have all of that as a preapplication requirement.

We originally published a step by step that started with “fill out this PDF application” as the first item. Three out of the first 5 applications did not contain proof that they had gone to a workshop or gotten a mortgage preapproval. Clearly that wouldn’t do!

Step by step without the education requirement listed, causing confusion.

We then published a step by step that basically repeated the education requirement. But it was very obvious that that was the absolute first thing you had to do to apply. And then we had much less of a problem with applicants missing it.

Step by step with the education requirement listed first, minimizing confusion.

Write your copy for a wide audience

Honestly, once you’ve taken care of structuring the content, you’re more than halfway there.

But there are a lot of tips on how to write copy in plain language. I’ll run through some that I’ve found make the biggest impact.

1. Be active

Your user has agency. You’re not doing something for them, you’re empowering them to do things for themselves.

People use websites or apps to achieve a task. Make it clear what the task is, such as “Apply for…” instead of “[Program name] application process.”

In the same vein, opt for active voice over passive voice. An example is “You can resell the unit at market prices” vs “The unit will be resold at market prices.” Using active voice makes it clearer who is doing what.

2. Think short

Shorter sentences are easier to parse. Have only one idea per sentence. Aim for 15 words per sentence, maximum. Aim for 3 sentences per paragraph, maximum.

You can’t stop people from scanning, but you can signal where a different section starts by using subheadings. (Also, people using screenreaders will navigate through a page just using subheadings. Use them liberally!)

If you’re going to have a long list separated by commas, use bulleted lists. If it’s ordered instructions, use numbered lists.

A bonus is that Google Translate has a much easier time with shorter sentences. It’s much harder for software to parse a sentence with multiple clauses. If you find yourself typing in a comma, try replacing it with a period and starting another sentence.

3. Write like you talk

We were all taught in school to write like we wanted to seem smart. The bigger words we used, the smarter we’d seem. Unfortunately, that ignores the fact that the average reading level in the US is Grade 8. Everything you were taught about SAT words, AP tests, and college essays is actually not helpful! You have throw all those rules out the window if you want to write for as many people as possible.

San Francisco Digital Services aims for Grade 5 or 6, using Hemingway App as a guide. We don’t always get there, but it’s the goal!

The original DALP page was at a Grade 11 reading level. The new DALP page is now at a Grade 7 reading level. It was admittedly Grade 6 before we started adding more detail to it. But it’s important to try to push it as low as possible, before government starts creeping back in!

We’ve almost made it into a contest. I end all my drafts with a note about the reading level. That way, city stakeholders can see it and try to keep it low. (This blog post? Grade 5!)

4. Use “you” and “we” if it’s clear

Nothing alienates a user more than reading “the applicant” or “the department” down a webpage.

Think of the page as a conversation. You are the author, and are talking to the reader. For government services, there’s going to be action taken on both sides during any process.

When it was clear that there was one author and one reader, I used “you” to refer to the applicant. I used “we” to refer to MOHCD. It’s a lot warmer and more direct to read.

Take a look at more of our writing tips on the San Francisco Digital Service’s content style guide.

Collaborate to leverage content

I may have written the words, but I couldn’t have done it alone. Collaboration across roles is necessary, for content operations as well as marketing that new content.

Have open communications with program staff

Folks who are on the front lines will tell you when the content can be improved. They get calls and emails from the public, after all! They are also the first to notice when the content is improved.

I make it clear that anyone can contact me if there is an issue that can be solved by updating content. Having clear and accurate content is the first step toward earning your users’ trust. Presenting inaccessible, outdated content can lose their trust. You need collaboration to make sure the content is the best it can be.

Work across roles to boost impact

I was not the only person at MOHCD working on communications with the public. We had Kim Dubin, a FUSE Corps executive fellow who did all of the public relations work.

It was great because I could focus on delivering content to improve services. I didn’t have to attend press conferences or talk to reporters. Kim did a wonderful job connecting people to the content, and letting me know when the website needed more.

For DALP, it culminated in an SF Chronicle article that laid out all of the eligibility requirements I had already laid out. The article encouraged people to apply, and soon our office was inundated with calls from interested applicants.

The combination of the SF Chronicle article and the improved application content made an impact. In 2017, 198 people successfully applied for DALP. In 2018, 266 did, an increase of 34%.

What’s next?

Writing relevant, clear content is proven to improve services. But we can do more in government.

There was a NYTimes article back in May, that talked about how 6,580 San Franciscans applied for a lottery to rent 95 apartments. DALP is similar—it has a lottery too.

The 266 applicants are currently ranked on a lottery result list. MOHCD staff will go through their paperwork in that order. In 2017, they got through about 80 applications and loaned to 23 households before funds ran out.

My efforts in increasing the number of DALP applicants only gave more people a chance. It doesn’t actually help more people. What actually helps more people is having more availability. It means having more housing, and it means having more funds to loan.

As a city employee, official policy is that I can’t tell you how to vote.

But I can tell you that your vote matters. I can tell you that this year, we have 116% more DALP funds to loan out because San Francisco voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition A back in 2015.

Better services can give more people access. But what will make huge strides is in policy changes and civic engagement. And we hope content can help do that too, in talking about impact and connecting the dots.

Content is here to stay, and we certainly hope that it continues making a real difference in people’s lives.

I spoke about this topic at a Designers + Geeks event in San Francisco on November 15, 2018, called “Designing for Inclusion.” There is video from the talk!

On The Dark Knight, IA Summit, and designing communities we want

2018-07-18T00:00:00Z

10 years ago today, a Batman movie was released. Normally that’s nothing to celebrate, so I’m amused to see 10-year retrospectives of The Dark Knight across multiple entertainment news sites. There are already articles about how the film changed moviemaking and geek culture forever, for good and/or bad.

For the entertainment industry, The Dark Knight’s impact is measured one way. For me personally, its impact means something quite different.

This 10-year anniversary was an unmissable opportunity for me to reminisce about the experiences I discovered and the inspiring people I met. And to take stock of my journey across the last decade – learning how to design experiences, and more recently, how to design the communities we want to be part of. And lastly, what it means to truly make a difference.

All of this began out of my experience around this one film, one that inspires me even today.

I am very much not joking when I tell people that The Dark Knight changed my life.

“Let’s wind the clocks back…”

10 years ago, I was in a completely different place.

I was 2 years into a technician job at a cancer research lab, and I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. For most lab techs 2 years in, they’re applying for grad school or med school. Taking that next big step in their career. But all I knew was, I didn’t want to do either! More STEM school would mean more rounds of self-flagellation. (One round in college was enough for me, thank you very much!)

But I liked doing bench work (a.k.a. the stuff you see on CSI), and I really liked the people I worked with. So I stayed. Going through the motions, more or less.

Going down the rabbit hole

And then I got pulled into an intriguing online puzzle. I’d been vaguely aware of a viral marketing campaign for the then-upcoming Batman movie, but I hadn’t been that interested before. Most of it, up to that point, had been unskilled exercises in showing up at a certain place. The first person to do it would get all the glory. For someone who worked a full-time job, count me out, right?

But this exercise was different. It was a puzzle that depended upon arcane knowledge of the campaign’s history. And it was online. There wasn’t one winner, just a group effort in online fan forums to solve the puzzle.

To contribute, I could look things up online. It turns out that looking up details of previous campaigns took a lot more effort than people (other than me, apparently) were willing to expend. So I started researching. And researching even more. And documenting, on an existing wiki. And aiming newbies toward the wiki so we wouldn’t be having the same discussion over and over again. Making sense of things.

And the moment we solved the puzzle through our collective efforts hours later, I was hooked.

For the next year and a half, I became the resident expert of this game. For one, I learned the whole shebang was called an “Alternate Reality Game,” or ARG.

I observed how the games and story pieces were designed to promote collaboration. I noted how the game designers nudged us down the right paths without direct interference.

A tight-knit community formed to support the continuous puzzle-solving effort. This was pre-GamerGate and even pre-Twitter, which I consider to be innocent times now. (I probably don’t have to mention that the vast majority of this community consisted of young men. They always had my back.)

We were just glad to have fun together, being involved in this strange, engrossing story.

Discovering design

After it was all over (I’m talking maybe 5 IMAX viewings total), I wasn’t done. I still wanted to acknowledge the experience that tight-knit community had, the magic that we felt for more than a year.

I decided to make an online archive. I didn’t know the first thing about making a website then, but I didn’t let that stop me. I took it upon myself to learn.

First, I learned about organizing content, because I knew I’d be handling a lot of it. I learned what that was called – information architecture. I made a content inventory and link map in Excel that consisted of 975 rows.

I learned about user experience design, and about creating personas to represent my audience. I learned about using discrete pieces of content to tell a story. I used Powerpoint to create my first wireframes. I wrote a lot.

I learned about HTML, CSS, Javascript, and JQuery. I learned about getting hosting and a domain. And I made my website, hand-coding all 475(ish) pages.

Why So Serious Redux home page as shown on laptop screen.

After about a year of work and loving almost every single second (aside for some snags with JQuery), I thought, “Hey if I did this all myself for this long and still like it, I should do it for a job!”

10 years, several design certificate programs, some hard years freelancing, and a few lucky breaks later, I’m here.

I now help make sense of San Francisco’s affordable housing program for almost a million residents. Starting next month, I will extend that impact out to all of San Francisco’s services.

I have been involved in some of the most visible user experience and information architecture communities in the world, working with designers I’ve looked up to for years. Some of these designers I now call friends.

Every day, I still reel at what I get to do.

Coming “home” to Chicago

This year, in March, the IA Summit conference was in Chicago, where most of The Dark Knight was filmed on location. I happened to be on the 2018 organizing committee, acting as content strategist/front-end developer for the website, as well as over-excited social media maven.

It was my first time in Chicago, but it also felt like coming home. This is where it all started for me, 10 years ago with a Batman movie.

Now I was working with some of my heroes, and becoming inspired and recharged by them in the magical 5 days that IA Summit always was.

Result of a last-minute jaunt to The Signature Room at the 95th, recommended by IAS18 speaker Duane Degler.

That could have been the end of it. This part of my story, circling around in a nice retrospective bow. As reality usually works, this story’s not close to done.

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain”

There were rumblings after IA Summit, about the community being unsafe, despite its initially welcoming nature. About the code of conduct being nothing more than some words on a webpage, because the culture allowed for known bad actors to participate year after year. That they would still be around next March, when the event would switch hands and become the Information Architecture Conference.

It came to a head on July 9, when the conference’s governing body released a (now-removed) legalese-heavy CYA Grievance Procedure for Code of Conduct violations. The way that it was released sent a clear message of bulldozing any concern for people who might want to file a report, in favor of reducing liability for the conference.

Twitter exploded. A number of very visible speakers and volunteers resigned over a culture that protected the careers of bad actors over the safety of attendees. (In general, it was not a good week for Codes of Conduct at design conferences.)

In the aftermath, I was mostly disappointed when I realized how many leaders in this empathy-focused industry were cowardly, refusing to take a stand on what kind of community they wanted to build. Going on as if nothing was wrong, when there was a “missing stair” in our midst that the people in charge refused to talk about.

At the same time, I acknowledge that when this happens, most people aren’t out to hurt others or make others feel unsafe.

“I believe in Harvey Dent”

We all have our own mental models for how the world works. We’ve meticulously created an architecture of beliefs that govern our reality.

How we approach social interactions, how we think about success, how we think about our own potential. Each one is a window into our perception of how the world works.

It’s not an accident that a film about order and chaos was shot in grid-dependent Chicago.

“This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object”

When we hang our beliefs on something, we will attempt to rewrite our own realities to make it true. Even if it isn’t.

Any cognitive dissonance and defensive behavior results in a backfire effect, where you hang onto beliefs even more. Even if they’re wrong.

The harder someone pushes, the more we push back. Sometimes until we become the very people we vowed we wouldn’t be.

“Does it depress you….to know just how alone you really are?”

Working against a backfire effect, especially on a societal level, can feel insurmountable.

How can we fix a system that just accepts a level of harm, that allows for various systemic –isms to go unchecked, that promotes vicious competition over healthy collaboration?

“They’re only as good as the world allows them to be”

We can design around it. It’s possible. Our mental models are affected by what we perceive as incentives and goals inherent in the system.

To combat the backfire effect, we can’t just burn everything down. We have to replace it with something better. We have to rewrite people’s mental models.

That makes it possible to expect collaborative behavior out of everyone. To make a system that doesn’t require that one extraordinary person take a stand against the entire world.

“Batman could be anybody”

We don’t need our heroes to come around. In fact, it’s better not to depend on our heroes saving us at all. We can’t wait for them.

We can design our own incentives to make it work for us. We can design around the behaviors we predict, to create the kind of world we want to see.

Take the ARG that started this whole journey. When coming up with a new activity, the foremost thought on the game designers’ minds was player safety. They had to predict the extremes of what players might do in their excitement, and create the activities accordingly.

Granted, there will always be hiccups and unforeseen crowding in planning something unprecedented like a Joker-themed scavenger hunt at San Diego Comic Con. But in general, the real-life events clearly leaned toward fun and collaboration, not dog-eat-dog competition. That’s by design.

Players reading a clue from the Batsignal exercise. Photo by DontCountToday.

“The night is darkest just before the dawn”

I believe we can do it. When creating a new community culture, we may not know what’s on the other side. We may only have a set of principles to guide our way. But that’s part of the beauty – by working with what we have, we can come up with something even better than we could imagine.

As a designer now, I see the potential of our collective impact more than ever. Ideally, we would design a world where someone like Batman wouldn’t even be needed.

While I embark on helping to build up the Information Architecture Conference and San Francisco Digital Services, I’ll take the following with me:

Don’t be the one hero. Forge alliances. Find a tribe that also believes we can make things better. I’m optimistic that we have the right team behind IAC and SF Digital Services to make this happen.
Learn from each other. Encourage each other. We can only make the most impact if we put our brains together and combine our expertise. Take a look at analogous areas and see what they’re doing. Maybe you can take something from that.
Meet people where they are. Don’t forget that we are all human, and all personally struggling with different things.
Design the narratives for where we all want to go. Decide what the incentives should be. We have to plan ahead in order to secure the futures we want.

“…Not a hero…a silent guardian, a watchful protector, a dark knight”

So, how come people are still talking about a movie that came out 10 years ago? Many will talk about its elevation of superhero movies, the political relevance, and Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance.

For me, The Dark Knight’s legacy hinges on its last 2 minutes and what it inspires in me.

Batman and his allies have been beaten and battered, their ideals utterly broken over the course of only a few days. But they still believe that a better world is possible.

Batman believes in that possibility so much, that he sacrifices his own legacy to see it through.

We need some of that unflagging optimism now. To face a broken system, a system that has failed us multiple times, and say, “We can make this better.”

Using a lie isn’t the best way of going about this; it obviously isn’t sustainable. I love you Batman, but no need to be so dramatic!

But we can forge alliances, combine our strengths, listen to people, and design narratives to lead people in the right direction. We can make a better world, no heroes required.

Let’s get started.

How to kick butt at your next job interview (even if you suck at speaking)!

2018-07-13T00:00:00Z

It’s just about that time – a lot of people I know are looking for a new role. And one part of that experience looms over all others: the job interview!

Turns out I have a lot of feelings about job interviews too. Here’s what I have learned, as someone who doesn’t suck at job interviews even though she sucks at speaking (more on that later).

Job interviews are scary!

First off, yes, job interviews are SCARY, in all caps! They’ll always be intimidating, no matter how many you’ve done. A group of strangers are judging your abilities for an hour, or 3, or 6. And they hold the key to your future – whether you’ll get the job or not! How do you even begin to handle the pressure?

Lots of people will tell you to practice your public speaking. Or to practice interviewing with your friends. They might think it’s important to get yourself to a place where you are as slick as a salesperson.

But what if I’m not as slick as a salesperson?

I actually don’t believe success at interviewing has much to do with what you say in the moment.

You see, I have a stutter. It can be pretty severe. QVC would not hire me to sell anything, that’s for sure!

Yet I’m at about 70% success rate when I get to the interview stage.

In fact, the last time I remember my stutter being so bad it felt like I was barely getting words out of my mouth, it was at a job interview. I got the job anyway! It also happened to be my first full-time UX role, transitioning from a science career. I didn’t have impressive design degrees or companies in my past to back me up.

In fact, they even told me they picked me over people “with more experience” because they liked my storytelling. Not how I told the story, but what I said.

So, I fully believe it’s not how you say things, but what you say. Prepare for your interview with that in mind.

1. Deconstruct the job description

The very first thing to do, is to go through the job description with a fine-toothed comb. You’re going to work backwards, to find out what they really want someone to do.

This is much easier if you know someone who knows the hiring manager, so they can tell you exactly what they’re looking for! Sometimes it isn’t very obvious from the job description, but you do what you can.

Let’s go through an example.

This is the posting that ended up as my first full-time UX job. Take a look at what I emphasized:

The new site must be built immediately as it is using technology that is more than 15 years old. It is no longer supported and at the end of its life. The department urgently needs a Website Content Editor who will analyze and document the existing site. They will organize the content and create the pages for all the information that needs to be published using a Content Management System. They will also create all documentation which will be used by the staff to maintain the system, as well as implement future system enhancements.

The Website Content Editor will have the following responsibilities:

Inventory and analyze the department’s current web content and other relevant source materials and perform gap analysis

Create content for the website and update website daily ensuring that the information is current, accurate, and structured appropriately

Create web content to support the functions of the department

Document web content and structure

Optimize content for search engines

Keeps up-to-date with best practices in writing for the web, internal publications, and business industry trends

Interview various stakeholders to understand business goals and target audiences

Align content with organizational goals

Collaborate with the business experts to gather requirements and document them

Communicate effectively with project teams

Number of years of experience: 5+; Strong system requirements gathering and documentation; strong hands-on experience designing and working with HTML and images. Imaging software such as Dreamweaver or Photoshop and content management systems; strong hands-on experience with website structure, strategy and web writing; and excellent proofreading and grammatical skills required.

Soft Skills: Excellent writing, communication and organizational skills; works effectively in a team environment; good customer service skills; and has the ability to manage multiple tasks to completion with established deadlines.

Did you notice what wasn’t in that listing? There was zero mention of UX, UX design, information architecture, or content strategy. Sometimes you have to do deep dives to find what the role actually entails.

A note about “experience”

Also, did you notice the years of experience that job listing asked for? 5+. And how much experience did I have at the time? A few years of part-time freelancing, really.

Years of experience isn’t nearly as important as being able to do the job.

To be fair, many famous companies (read: the ones that everyone applies to) use “years of experience” to filter out the piles of job applications they need to sort through. It’s the only way to make the process manageable for them.

That’s why referrals are so important when applying to those companies. You’ll stand out from the pack, no extra years of experience required! So it always depends.

Don’t let experience requirements stop you in your tracks by default. Always consider context.

2. Figure out the one skill they really want

There’s often a long list of skills requested in every job posting.

99.99% of the time, they’ll never find someone who has them all. If they are on a do-or-die quest to actually get that unicorn, you can’t help them anyway. I always have a chuckle when I see positions open for 6 months or more.

Most of the skills are nice-to-haves. They might help if two candidates are otherwise the same and equally likable. But people can’t keep those qualities in their heads all at once when they’re talking to you. They usually just have one important skill in mind.

If they find someone who can do the one thing they’re really looking for, their brains light up and go, “Ooh, that’s exactly what we need!” Everything else doesn’t seem as important.

So distill that job listing down to the one skill you’ll need to have, to be successful in the role!

What I got out of that example job posting, was that they needed someone to organize and write content, because what they had was a mess 15 years in the making. I had to show I could organize content well. It was obvious they were desperate to find someone who could do that.

3. Position yourself as someone who’s got that skill down and will step up right away

You’ve decided on that one skill that will make or break you. Now comes the time for persuasion. But again, not in the slick salesperson way. It means choosing the right past project to focus on during the interview. You’re going to use it, to show how you were successful in that skill.

If you have a varied collection of past projects to choose from, you’ll have a lot of options. For this job interview at this early point in my career, I didn’t have much. But I only needed one. I decided to go all in on one freelance project where I restructured the website, and it resulted in an increase in sales.

That’s it. That was my pitch.

I know how to organize content well, because I did it for this e-commerce site, and sales went up.

I took every opportunity to go back to that. Even when I was barely getting any words out from sheer nervousness, I managed to convey at least that much.

But it was enough. I communicated that I could help solve their problem, and do it well. They could visualize me stepping into the role right away and being successful. And that’s how I got the nod.

A note about being able to code

I won’t lie. A huge part of being able to step immediately into roles I’ve been hired to do, is my ability to code serviceable front-end. (By which I mean HTML, lots of CSS, and enough jQuery to be useful.)

I’ve always been essentially a UX/Dev Team of One. If I want a guarantee of my work actually getting online, I need to do it myself.

Some organizations will really appreciate someone who can do this. To have someone who will do whatever it takes to get stuff done. These would be your small startups, or orgs without dedicated teams for both design and development.

Other organizations couldn’t care less. They would rather you have specialized experience working in large teams. These would be any orgs large enough to have dedicated teams for design as well as development. They won’t need you to code if there are 5 other people who can do it faster and better.

That’s another thing to look for, when you examine the job description. What kind of company is it, what kind of team is it? Will they need you to play by all the political rules, or will they need you to have real moxie?

For my first job, I knew I needed to do some coding, because the skills list included HTML. I ended up learning ASP.NET from scratch for that role to get the job done…but technically I wasn’t wrong!

4. Make it hard for them to say no

Why go through all this effort in the first place? Why isn’t it enough to prove that you have the requisite intelligence and experience to do the job, on a general level?

Because they are not hiring a list of filled-in checkboxes. They are hiring a person. They are hiring someone who will be on their team, to help them solve a problem they have.

Many hiring managers state that their biggest fear is in hiring the wrong person. So you have to anchor them in the belief that you are the right person, from the get-go.

The easiest way to do that, is to go into the interview already familiar with what’s important to them. The hiring manager doesn’t have to do the cognitive work in figuring out how you’d fit into the team. They won’t have to look at your list of skills and accomplishments, and guess how that will help them. You’ll tell them exactly how you’ll do that!

And when someone is already imagining you being a successful part of the team, it’s a lot harder for them to say no down the line. 😃 They’ve already pictured you there. Saying no later means losing you, in their minds. Loss aversion is one of the most powerful cognitive biases, after all.

Instead of letting your list of skills and accomplishments lead, you control your own narrative. But first you have to put in the work.

5. Don’t forget about the work you do before you even apply

The more your past experience naturally fits with the job they plan on having you do, the easier all this will be. The connection between your past projects and the future role will be more natural and evident.

So, picking the right jobs to apply to is extremely important.

As are referrals, of course. If you find the right role at the right organization, you want to make sure you leverage everything you have to get it! I have another post about how to network when you’re an introvert, to help you get started.

6. Don’t settle for “I guess they’ll work…” Strive to be the one “YES!”

One successful job interview I had more recently, my stutter was a lot better but still evident. What probably helped most was the 2-3 people who referred me directly. And the fact I brought in a case study of a past project that was pretty much exactly what they wanted for the work. I didn’t even go through the entire thing. I only pointed out the most relevant parts when a question called for it.

In fact, they told me later, that after I had left the interview, the team members looked at each other and were like, “Can we just get her to stay here right now and ask her to do THAT??”

That’s the kind of reaction you want. 😃

Remember, the goal isn’t to get a bunch of companies to include you in a pool of 3-5 final candidates where any one of you would do. The goal is to get the right organization, offering the right role, to shout “YES!!”

To do that, never underestimate the importance of prep time. That extra effort, even an hour or two, can make all the difference!

To sum up:

Deconstruct the job description.
Figure out the one skill they really want.
Position yourself as someone who’s got that skill down and will step up right away.
Make it hard for them to say no.
Don’t forget about the work you do before you even apply (choosing the right roles; referrals).
Don’t settle for being in a final pool of 3-5 where any one of you would do. Strive to be the one “YES!”

How to make an impact as a designer

2018-05-29T00:00:00Z

So one thing has recently gotten my goat design-wise, and it’s not the usual handwringing about portfolios or coding or even “what do we call ourselves?” (Although those are entertaining too, in their own right.)

I’m talking about something more inherent about design, in how newbies are approaching the design field. I especially see it in students and career-changers.

You see, I’m a career-changer about 5 years out. I came from a completely unrelated field: molecular biology.

Here’s what I know about how to "make it" in UX, in one sentence:

Designers, stop asking for permission to make an impact.

I actually have lots of feelings about that. So here we go.

Stop worrying about the degrees you don’t have. Stop worrying how “good” at design you are. Stop worrying about getting the attention of so-and-so famous designer or someone at this-and-this famous company. Stop worrying if you’ll measure up, if someone will just give you a chance to do design.

Because you know what? There will always be someone more impressive than you on paper. Always. That’s something my mom drummed into my head as a kid. I think she meant to keep me humble, but instead I relegated myself to academic mediocrity, hah.

But that kind of thinking is actually very freeing. Especially to an adult navigating a new, ever-changing field.

People with impressive degrees and companies on their resume are probably applying to the very same jobs you are. Your resume will sit in a pile with other resumes showing 3, 5, 10 more years of experience than you have. Yes, that thought is scary. How could you ever compete? You might be considering, you know, padding that resume a bit…but don’t do that!

The solution is a lot more simple. You just don’t have to play by those rules.

Your impact as a designer doesn’t depend on the degrees you have, or the past companies you worked for. Being able to make an impact doesn’t even mean having any experience on paper. It’s more of a mindset.

Being a designer means solving problems for people. Period.

If you see a problem, if you see someone struggling, this should be your immediate reaction.

There are problems everywhere to solve. There are always ways to make things better. That is what a designer does – they make things better, wherever they happen to be.

It doesn’t have to mean designing a world-changing product like the iPhone. Making an impact could be helping your friend get their business off the ground by making a Squarespace site for them. It could be leveraging Google Sheets to save your colleagues 15 minutes every single day. (I did all of those in my short journey to city government!)

It might not seem big to you, but for those people you made an impact on, it means a great deal.

So start where you are now. Use what you have.

How can you make things better around you? That’s your brief. How do you know if it’s better? These are your metrics. Write a case study about it and boom, look, now you have a portfolio piece too!

(I’ve also written a blog post about how to persuasively talk about your impact at a job interview, no matter how small!)

Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to be acknowledged for your work. But if you aren’t there yet, don’t wait. The only way you can make an impact…is by making an impact.

Design is not about awards or accolades or what your resume looks like. It’s the impact you make.

That’s why I love working in govt. I’ve gotten comments about it “being a trial by fire” for a new designer and I’m like, “Are you kidding? Whatever I do will literally be 1000x better than what exists now!”

I could let things be either nonexistent or unusable, or I could do something about it.

So I took stock. I talked to people, to whoever could give me their time. I did what I could. There’s no perfect way to make a difference. Just talk to people, work with them, and do something. There’s nothing to lose when your do-nothing options are “nonexistent or unusable.”

Once you start making an impact at that level, you can never go back.

Even in government, it took a lucky break for me to feel like I was worthy enough to make this much of an impact. I was pinged randomly by a recruiter for my first full-time tech job at the City of Los Angeles. Before then, I thought I needed to do a Code for America fellowship to transition to government. And before I could apply to that, I needed to do something important in civic tech, etc etc. That rabbit hole never ends.

But instead I was dropped right into it. And it turns out I was perfectly capable of making a difference even without the perfect resume.

So all you have to do is show up, every day, willing to make an impact wherever you are.

Be done asking for permission.

Expanded from the tweetstorm I had shortly after Infinity War came out. Still not enough Steve Rogers in that…

Tips for a new design grad

2017-08-30T00:00:00Z

Recent design grad, I can’t assure you that I know what I’m doing. I’m only a few years off of a career change into design myself, from a completely unrelated field. I still remember how I felt when I was totally green. But hey, I’m still here and actually being given more responsibilities the longer I do this, so I’d say it’s worked pretty well so far!

Here are some tips I’ve learned, that will hopefully smooth the path for you:

1. Trust is your most valuable currency

How much design work you get to ship is directly related to how much your colleagues & clients trust you. The most direct way to do that is to do your work well, and communicate what’s going on. (Yes, there are also ways to hobnob with your coworkers. But for us introverts, being kickass at your job is pretty straightforward!)

There’s no need to pretend you know everything. If you don’t know, figure out who to ask for guidance, or figure out how to do it yourself. And if it’s still a no-go, figure out a workable alternative.

You know those impossible requirements on job listings you’re looking at right now? That’s because someone in HR doesn’t trust that the new employee can solve their problem unless they’ve got all the skills and degrees. You can bypass that by earning their trust in other ways. Prove that you can solve their problems. Prove to them that they can trust you to do it!

A note about knowing how to code

As a designer, you shouldn’t need to add “full-time developer” to your job title. However, I will say that coming to the rescue by coding up a solution on the spot, earns people’s trust like nothing else! I’ve gotten pretty good at swooping in and saving the day with just HTML, CSS, JQuery, and enough PHP knowledge to customize WordPress.

2. It always depends

So you know all that stuff you learned in school? All those design principles and how-tos?

You’ll throw a bunch of it out the window when you start working. Real life is not a design exercise. It will not sort itself nicely into a process that you can apply straight from your class notes.

It is messy. And it is a glorious challenge. Revel in it!

3. Learn voraciously

If you’ll be using technology as the backdrop for your design work, know that technology changes all the time. When technology changes, people’s use changes, and design changes with it. It’s the nature of the beast. You can’t alter it, and you certainly can’t stop it.

What is less obvious is that people’s reactions to those technology and design shifts also change their behavior, expectations, and workflow. So you’ll need to adjust to that too.

No matter where you sit in the technology ecosystem, adaptation is the name of the game.

4. Give generously

Because people’s expectations of technology are changing all the time, you can’t be at the forefront of design if you learn solely from books. And neither can those who come after you.

What you experience might be useful for someone else. Share what you know. And step up when help is needed. The community that shows up with you will be your greatest ally. There’s so much work to be done, for all designers. Let’s make it easier for everyone, so we can all go farther.

5. Assume nothing

You might think you know what’s best for a design, given your new degree. You’d be wrong.

Prototype and test your ideas. You’re only one person, and your fellow designers are not typical users of technology.

Discovering the ways you were wrong, and then improving your work to achieve real progress, is one of the great joys of design.

6. It’s not about you

Art serves the ego. Design serves the people.

You are now a conduit through which information, experience, and creativity converge into solutions to make people’s lives better. Your value as a designer is defined by how much positive impact you have on people’s lives.

Nobody cares about your degree, where you went to school, how pixel-perfect your mockups are, or how beautifully you animated your prototypes. If it doesn’t have impact, it’s not good design.

Design also doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s more than likely you’ll work on a team. Share the credit. Lift each other up. Positive impact is the goal, not individual awards or accolades.

7. Never stop hating bullshit

A Designer Hangout friend of mine, Louis Elfman, once described a designer as: “Someone who sees bullshit, gets mad, and wants to help fix it!” I think it is the perfect definition of a designer.

We keep improving designs because crappy designs make us seethe. It isn’t acceptable until it’s frictionless, and even then, it’s still probably giving someone else trouble. So we keep on.

The energy generated by hatred of bullshit will see you through months of fighting for user research, evangelizing UX, navigating legacy interactions, overseeing massive content rewrites, and so on. You’ll need that energy, because you’ll never stop fighting in the name of good design.

Often, the messier it is, the more it’s worth doing. The potential impact for even a minor improvement can be staggering, even if it’s won through months of meetings, negotiations, patience, and being extremely resourceful. (I’ve only worked in government as a UXer, so I should know!) I was only able to make the kind of impact I did there, because like I say: “My hatred of bullshit far outweighs my fear of looking dumb.”

If it makes you mad, go fix it!

8. You have more power than you think

Design has stepped out from the confines of Letraset and Photoshop, to improve real-world services in fields like government and healthcare.

Your days as a designer don’t have to be spend agonizing over the color of a button, if you don’t want that. You can dream bigger. I quit cancer research for UX because I wanted to help people faster. I can’t say I’ve been disappointed so far!

Welcome to the wonderfully complex, ever-changing world of design! If you’d like to join our community of amazing UX designers at Designer Hangout, give me a ping!

Building a network, for introverts!

2017-06-21T00:00:00Z

In this era of job hunting, we hear it all the time: “To find a job, it’s all about networking!” Indeed, studies have shown that up to 85% of all jobs are filled via networks, although “networking” seems mysterious and insurmountable when you’re just starting out. And especially when you’re not a naturally gregarious extrovert!

By some miracle, I seem to have more or less figured out this whole “networking” thing, as an extreme introvert who also had social anxiety. Even now, my preferred downtime involves vegging out and talking with zero people. (Lemme tell you, it’s very nice for an extreme introvert to have an introverted spouse!) My healthy rate for social outings, where I’d be directly engaging with people for hours, is about one every two weeks. It took me years to reconcile that fact about myself. My time at college was mostly spent fretting about not wanting to go to parties and not meeting people and what was wrong with me???

Don’t get me wrong, I like learning about people. I even like being around them, such as working in a coffee shop. I’ve been participating in online message boards since I was 13. I just…don’t like physically participating in social things very often.

If you told high school or college me that I’d be focusing on my network for a job search, I would have belly-laughed at you. When and where would I have gotten a network?

Networking opens doors and creates community

So I just started a new job, moving from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Here are the stats of that job search:

2 job applications
1 interview
1 offer

I KNOW! Even I’m sitting here going, “Whaaaat? How the heck did that happen??”

Here’s the thing: Yes, I did happen to be unusually qualified for the job. Whatever they needed, I’d already acquired those skills (and more!) in my previous gig. My entire team could vouch for the quality of my work. The results spoke for themselves.

But also, multiple people referred me to that position.

By the time I applied, the manager had already heard my name from people he trusted. The first thing he said when we sat down for the interview was, “Well, you certainly know the right people!”

So what happened? How the heck did I get here, from feeling guilty that I wasn’t social enough, holing myself up with my non-social hobbies?

First, I unlearned my social anxiety.

This doesn’t mean all social anxiety can be unlearned. In my case, I was taught to be socially anxious by my parents when I was a kid, who noted that I had a stutter and was emotionally sensitive. They wanted me not to say certain things, not do certain things, and not to stutter, in case people thought I was lying. They were trying to protect me, as parents are wont to do, but it turns out, trying not to stutter does not actually help you stop stuttering. And worrying about the things you shouldn’t do doesn’t help with making friends either. Figures.

However, I’m lucky to have a cooperative brain. I am extremely level-headed, even in stressful times. For some folks, their brain chemicals need some tweaking to tamp down the mental noise, with talk therapy and/or medication. Do what you need to do to get to a point where you can reason with your brain, because there will be some reasoning necessary when you have social anxiety!

I’m also blessed to have a scientific mind, which I use to observe and test hypotheses, even social ones. As I grew up out of middle school idiocy (on my part and other kids’ parts), I simply observed that there were no long-term ramifications to my social awkwardness. Maybe a chuckle or two at the time, but in my experience, minor gossip is easily brushed off by others if you honestly care about other people and if your intentions are kind.

There are two big ideas that helped me unlearn my social anxiety:

1. People are usually gauging your reaction to yourself.

My stutter hasn’t gone away fully, but people seem to be reacting to it better. I don’t think it’s the stutter itself, but how I’m reacting to it. I’m not ashamed of it anymore. I trust that people are listening to my words and ideas, instead of how fluently those words are said. If I treat the stutter like it’s totally normal, people treat it like it’s totally normal.

Human beings are social animals, and we pick up emotional cues from others. It’s an observable biological effect! So instead of judging your actions as independent and absolute, people are actually gauging your reactions to your own actions. If someone is flustered or embarrassed, people around them are going to feel anxious and awkward too. If someone laughs off a mistake, people instantly feel more comfortable. If it’s not a big deal to someone who made the mistake, it must not be a big deal!

2. 80% of how someone treats you is actually a reflection of them.

Everyone is carrying a bag of rocks you can’t see. How they take action on anything depends on what they’re carrying. In order to see who someone truly is, you have to see what they do in a stressful situation. Doesn’t have to be big, it can be as minor as missing a turn while driving. It’s amazing, the range of reactions you get!

Usually when someone has treated me curtly, I’ve discovered later that they’d had a bad day – their commute was awful, work has been grueling, their kid has been sick. Some people are better at masking it than others. It would be nice if everyone learned how to regulate their emotions, but you can only control – and thus depend on – yourself.

Or if they’re curt to everyone all the time, well, obviously it’s not you, they’re just jerks! Very little of it actually is about you specifically.

You only have to ask yourself two questions:

Are you considering other people?
Are your intentions kind?

If so, you’re on the right track! If someone wants to brush you off or treat you rudely, then that’s on them, not you.

An aside: There’s an entire system that focuses on this kind of thinking, called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Turns out I’d been doing a light form of it on myself since I was a child and didn’t know it!

Building a network

With that foundation, here’s how I built from there, layer by layer:

Be generous
Strive for excellence
Be interested, not interesting
Volunteer
Get a wing-mate
Practice, practice, practice!

1. Be generous

Despite common usage (including in this piece), I actually don’t like to call it “networking,” because that implies that it’s all about me schmoozing about. It’s not like that at all for me – I’m really helping to build a community. And in order to do that, you have to believe that the world is collaborative. We get ahead by building each other up, not by stepping on others. Nobody wants to help out someone who just takes. Generosity begets more generosity.

Being generous means sharing ideas you’re thinking about, sharing lessons you’ve learned, and having general conversations too, if people invite them. That’s why we’re meeting people in the first place, really – to share with each other. Being generous also includes using your time, patience, ability to listen, and just plain old “showing up.”

There are wonderful things that we introverts have now that we didn’t have before, like online communities. You don’t have to rack up physical event counts to spread generosity anymore! I’ve made some good online friends on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and especially Designer Hangout on Slack.

I volunteered to moderate the enterprise channel on Designer Hangout, which I really had no business doing at the time, what with my one year of UX experience. But the enterprise space is something that I’m endlessly interested in, with its wicked problems and potential impact. And I wanted an excuse to ask questions, in the guise of promoting discussion! It didn’t matter to veterans like Dave Malouf or Jared Spool that a newbie like me was making sure everyone was playing nicely. (Unsurprisingly, the enterprise channel is full of people who play nicely! It’s a pretty easy gig.)

Sharing with others automatically makes you more visible to the community, which is never a bad thing! The more people know you, or know of you, the less work you’ll have to do in meeting them.

2. Strive for excellence

Here’s what I’ve found: Nobody cares how awkward you are, if you’re helpful and effective. They’d be idiots otherwise! And it doesn’t matter how many people you know, if you’re lazy, a chronic flake, or have a bad attitude. In fact, being any of those means you’d be undoing all of your social efforts. Your connections are trusting you with their own reputation, every time they refer you. And if word gets back that you’re not dependable, they’re less likely to help you out. They might even tell their friends. It’s a small world out there!

For introverts, always striving for excellence is an important point, especially if you feel pressured to do ALL THE THINGS. We have limited energy to go around – believe me, I know! Acknowledge the fact that you don’t have the energy to do everything. And in this case, if you can’t do it well, it’s better to save your energy for something more worthwhile.

If you’re not learning stuff or meeting cool people, it’s totally okay to say no. In fact, it’s better if you do say no, so it feels less of a slog doing things you’re not getting anything out of.

Plus, first impressions count. If you continually show up at community events, online or offline, with an air of “I’m in a bad mood, I hate everything,” then that is what you’ll be known for. Then nobody wants to hang out with you, which is a problem with the whole networking thing. 😉 Take a break, gather your wits, and be ready to engage people when you’re in the right headspace for it.

Whatever you do, give it the best you’ve got. Then when eyes are on you or an opportunity comes your way, people will know that you’re an eager, thorough, hardworking person. Not bad characteristics to be known for!

3. Be interested, not interesting

This will make the biggest difference in your networking experience, if you’re new. Many newbies believe they have to do something impressive in order to get the attention of more experienced folks. That they’d have to have paid their dues at a renowned company or have an awesome resume. Not so!

People like people who get excited about similar things. That’s all. And another thing that people like to do, is talk about what gets them excited. It doesn’t even have to be about work. It could be about food, or glasses, or shoes, or knitting – all of which has happened to me more than once!

If there’s no clear opening, I usually start out with “What brings you here?” or “What do you think of the event so far?” Then I start trying to understand their context. How did they get to where they are, physically or mentally? What sort of challenges are they facing? If they start talking freely about it, ask for more details! I’ve gotten people to engage fairly quickly with that simple tip, because I really am genuinely interested, and I’m trying to understand. (The book Humble Inquiry goes into more depth about how listening builds relationships!)

Seeking to understand someone’s context translates as caring about them, as a person. And all we want is to find people who are excited about the same things we are. The trick then, is find out what they’re passionate about, as quickly as possible.

Contrary to a lot of networking tips I’ve seen, I usually find it difficult to avoid shop talk at industry events. If you want to approach a speaker after a talk, well, shop talk is all you have to work with. But no matter the subject you have in common, be passionate about it!

For those who still harbor imposter syndrome at events:

I feel you, and I have a story about how I science-minded my way out of it, at least when meeting people at events. There was one time at a conference where I came up and said “Hi, how’s it going?” to an industry expert (who is generally familiar with what I’m about, as far as I know) at lunch. He then proceeded to introduce me to the rest of the table, talking about the “great work” I’d been doing at the City of LA, which honestly gripped me with terror for a few seconds. My exact thought process was, “You don’t know if I’ve been doing great work, you haven’t seen it! It could be total crap!”

Luckily, I held my composure long enough to accept the compliment as it was without sabotaging myself (thanks Marcella for kicking my butt about that – more about wing-mates later), and to realize an Important Thing: He didn’t have to see my UX deliverables to come to the conclusion that I must be doing great work. He knows I’ve been attending events, he’s seen me converse about UX and ask questions at a certain level. At that point, it doesn’t matter how many years of experience you have, it’s how you think that’s most important. My work will be great because of what I’m considering about it.

If you’re excited about something, you’ll automatically push yourself to learn as much as you can. It’s enough that you’re there talking to more experienced folks about what gets them going. In industries where networking is important, that implies you know that learning from other people, not just books or school curriculum, is important. Enthusiasm and an eagerness to learn counts for A LOT. It’s probably the most important thing, judging by how kindly I’ve been treated as a relative newbie meeting more knowledgeable folks.

Remember, everyone has felt like you at some point. Even the experts of today were newbies once, and still can have imposter syndrome themselves!

4. Volunteer

As an introvert, I still find it difficult to just walk up to strangers at happy hour events and introduce myself. I’m expected to stand around and…just meet people? Spontaneously? What?

I find it much easier to meet new people if we’re all working on something together, even if it’s as straightforward as setting up an event. Commenting on the work being done is a “gimme” icebreaker, for sure!

As a bonus, volunteering is a chance to hobnob with industry elites, while showing them what a smart, hard worker you are. (Ask any of the UXPALA directors or the IA Summit 2017 co-chairs about me!) Leaders want to work with people like them, who have that “take charge” mentality. I know folks who have gotten jobs after volunteering at events and meeting the organizers, who happened to be hiring for matching skills. You just never know!

On top of all that, you also get free admission to events! It’s a win/win/win!

5. Get a wing-mate

As you volunteer more, you’ll eventually catch the eye of someone with a lot of influence. This person can be your wing-mate, who can introduce you to lots more people. So you don’t have to do it all on your own! Yay!

Plus, since they have more experience than you, they can tell you the ins and outs of how the industry works, and how to position yourself in that context. (Which definitely includes how not to put your foot in your mouth!) That will set you up for bigger and better things, faster.

My main wing-mate is Marcella Missirian, President of UXPALA, who’s also my biggest UX cheerleader. She introduces me to everyone she knows, with adulation that I’m still not sure I deserve. But then that just goes back to tip #2. I work harder to be the person she sees me as. 🙂

I don’t think of it as “faking it ‘til you make it,” since people do have to see something in you to bother pushing you so hard. Sure, you may feel like a faker, but how you see yourself may not be how the external world sees you. Again, it’s about engaging your scientific mind and observing, instead of acting on assumptions. Especially if those assumptions are about yourself!

A note on the mentorship thing: I have a number of experienced folks I feel comfortable asking questions of, and I consider them all my mentors. (Designer Hangout is great for this, especially for multiple industries!) But I’ve never asked someone, “Will you be my mentor?” Still wondering how to do that without feeling ridiculous!

6. Practice, practice, practice!

Yup, the old adage is still true! Putting yourself out there will not necessarily come easily, especially if you’re not used to it.

A huge obstacle is getting over the fear of looking foolish and being judged. I’m still working on this, and part of my “training” (yes, I consider it training) is Toastmasters. I have had utterly awful speeches before, total train wrecks where my stutter settles on me like an intractable cloud of smog. But you know what? I survive every single one. It gets easier, and then I feel okay with putting myself out there a little more each time.

One thing I did learn from Toastmasters, is that you can actually feed off that feeling of being foolish. That translates as being excited and animated to an outside observer. The more serious and “professional” you try to be, the more stiff and antisocial you come off. Then, once again, nobody will want to hang out with you! That’s also partly why improv techniques are being adopted for business environments.

One specific item that took practice for me, was formulating questions when chatting with people I’d just met. When I started, I would completely blank out, paralyzed with fear that I would be judged on the quality of the questions I’d ask next. It got a lot easier after I discovered tip #3, that the most important thing is being interested. Though, getting my brain to actually come up with contextual questions on the fly still took practice!

Figure out which part of meeting new people you’re having trouble with, and take the effort to think through those aspects.

Give it some time

Like all big projects, things will likely move slowly. Trust and community, that takes time. You can’t expedite genuine human relationships.

This journey has been a good 4 years in the making for me. I discovered UX, then I started showing up to Meetups and other events. I started tweeting about them because I was genuinely excited to learn from others and share what I’d learned. Marcella pinged me to do social media for UXPALA, which opened more opportunities to meet others, mentor, do some public speaking, and keep practicing.

Things seemed to snowball this past year, when completely unexpected opportunities materialized. Co-teaching a class, being in charge of social media for IA Summit, and well, being referred by multiple people for one job, haha.

The job referral involved all the tips I outlined above, with the following factors:

Sharing my knowledge about working in civic tech, with a blog post.
Two Designer Hangout friends referring me to a job posting that was literally perfect for me.
A designer friend saw my blog post and introduced me to a few 3rd-level contacts, who all knew the manager for the exact job I was looking at.

A lot of luck, yes, but think of “luck” as “being ready when the opportunities come.” If you’re not ready or if there aren’t any opportunities, then you won’t “get lucky.” The more people you know, the more you are generous, then the “luckier” you become. It’s funny how that works!

Believe me, I didn’t think it was possible either, until it happened to me. You’ll never know unless you try.

So get out there…at your own pace!

Being introverted doesn’t mean you’re doomed to the unknown outskirts of professional life. Sure, it isn’t as easy and natural as an extrovert effortlessly waltzing into a conference afterparty. But with some thoughtful effort and the right attitude, even extreme introverts can find themselves integrated into an amazing community.

Thank you so much, to everyone who has been on this journey with me. I can’t remotely express how much it means to me. I never imagined that I’d be so loved. I’m already missing everyone in LA, but am looking forward to building a community in SF!

Thanks also to Dan Turner and Marcella Missirian for reading this over and giving me more ideas to chew on!

Everything you need to know about live-tweeting

2017-02-16T00:00:00Z

Despite continued insistence that Twitter is on its way out, it’s still one of the best resources for design right now. Tech moves so fast, that by the time information reaches a book, it’s often already 6 months outdated. Twitter is the most immediate way to see what experienced designers are up to, and you can even engage with them personally if you like. (One of my earliest Twitter experiences was having a short back-and-forth about learning design with typographer Erik Spiekermann. I kind of freaked out.) If you’re a designer who wants to spread a message, it’s a fantastic global platform to share your ideas and experiences, 140 characters at a time.

Another way to get inroads on Twitter is to share information you find. Lots of people do that by sharing articles, but I discovered another way to leverage Twitter – by live-tweeting talks I attend. Not just “Hey who else is here? [Photo of venue] #eventhashtag #eventhashtagyear #eventlocation”, but informative tweets that could summarize points from talks for those who weren’t there.

This is what I look like when I live-tweet. To the speaker, it doesn’t look like I’m paying attention at all, but they’ll open up Twitter later and find dozens of notifications.

Turns out I was pretty good at it! At full speed, I can do about one tweet a minute during a talk, and I can go all day like that. Thanks to those live-tweeting skills, I have earned hundreds of followers, received several books / one Chromecast / one professional Axure license (yay Twitter contests), one Directorship of Marketing (UXPALA), and most recently, two Social Media co-Directorships (World IA Day 2017 and IA Summit 2017). Having a Twitter contest at an event that I’m attending is pretty much a done deal. One time I was 20 minutes late to an hour-long talk and STILL got the most tweets!

But given my imminent move away from Los Angeles, it’s high time to pass the baton. At least the best I can – I’ve been told that live-tweeting is actually pretty difficult, though it seems to come naturally to me. I actually get bored if I don’t live-tweet, hah.

But here are some tips I have, for those who’d like to give it a go!

First, a few things about Twitter

The 140-character limit is a feature or a bug, depending on who you talk to. I happen to think it’s a feature, because it teaches you to be a strong, concise writer. I’ve had speakers come up to me and say that my tweets communicated their ideas better than their actual presentations. (I disagree, since I obviously learned something valuable from them, but it’s always a great compliment!) Each character counts, literally.

The extra-short form and social context allows each tweet to be inimitably shareable. That means that each tweet has to be as self-contained as you can get it. Each one should contain the speaker’s handle and the event hashtag, and be a complete sentence.

In the explosion of political discourse on Twitter, long strings of self-replies, comprised of complete or numbered partial sentences (“tweetstorms”), have become popular. But I advise against prioritizing it for live events, especially in numbered partial sentence form. For one, tweetstorms are meant to be stream of consciousness, and a live-event tweet should be directed.

Secondly, I’m pretty good at this live-tweeting thing, but even I can’t listen to a talk, take a photograph of a slide, compose a tweet, AND keep track of the number of tweets in a tweetstorm I’m in. You want to limit as many variables as you can.

A few general things about live-tweeting in particular

Q: Should I live-tweet this event?

If it’s an event that non-locals would find informative and interesting, then yes, I live-tweet it. They’re usually presentations (with or without slides) or speaking panels, where the amount of information coming at you is pretty dense. Nobody really needs to know minute-by-minute updates of a workshop or networking happy hour. Taking pictures of a workshop when interesting things are happening is good to do, especially to attract attention toward the event organizers and/or sponsors. But constant updates at a happy hour would be considered “gossip,” which wouldn’t necessarily improve your professional reputation!

Another consideration is that presentations usually follow a strict outlined structure. Speakers introduce a point, give some examples to support their point, then conclude that point before moving onto the next one. Once you’ve attended a few of these, you can start to sense the basic structure of a talk as you’re listening to one. Live-tweeting a presentation gets much easier after that.

It’s much harder to live-tweet a panel or a casual chat, because it’s more freeform. But well-produced panels still have a structure to them, and a good moderator will prepare the speakers and keep things organized.

The most difficult event I ever live-tweeted was a “Town Hall” organized for Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s HitRECord community. It was a 3-hour-long Q&A where questions were not prepared beforehand, so the answers given by the staff often meandered. A lot. I would listen to someone’s 5-minute answer, wracking my brain to find a tweetable point out of the whole spiel. But hey, I got an endorsement from the “boss man” JGL himself afterwards, so that’s a plus!

.@liannaoddi @anitaycheng yes indeed bravo!!
— Joseph Gordon-Levitt (@hitRECordJoe) April 12, 2015

Q: What subjects are good for me to live-tweet?

That’s up to you! Live-tweeting is infinitely easier if you have some context over what the topic of the talk is before you start. I realized this while attempting to live-tweet a JavaScript talk at UX+Dev Summit 2016. I know enough JavaScript to read it, but I don’t know what JavaScript developers would find important about updated features, because I don’t know the full extent of its current features.

The more general the subject, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to understand enough to write succinctly for it. You can’t bullshit your way through an informative tweet.

In addition, the more general the subject, the more people you’ll have engaging with your tweets. If I was still in molecular biology, I’m doubtful that I would live-tweet DNA repair conferences. (Yes, there are such things!) There just isn’t enough of an audience, at least an audience not already at the conference, to bother. I’ll also make a bet that not many DNA repair scientists are on Twitter in the first place, because it’s so specialized and they have their own ways of furthering their work in the right circles.

The point of Twitter is to engage with others. If there isn’t a strong interest or strong community already on Twitter about your subject, your efforts won’t be recognized.

Q: What do I need to live-tweet?

The only things you absolutely need is a smartphone, a connection, and a Twitter account. Phones are much easier to take photos with, if there’s a really informative diagram or slide you want to share. However, my iPhone 5S’s battery life is pretty crap after the iOS10 update, so if it’s a multi-hour event, I bring a spare battery pack and charging cord too. And turn on low power mode for my phone the entire day…

Despite my high tweeting rate, my typing still isn’t that great on my phone. I feel like I spend half my time deleting and re-typing stuff. So if it’s all-day summit or multi-day conference, I’ll also bring my iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard. (I use a New Trent Airbender keyboard/stand/case – it rotates 360, locks closed, and has hard plastic keys. It’s also much cheaper than what you can get from Apple!) You can still take photos with it, although it’s more unwieldy than a phone. (Pro-tip, taking pics on your iPhone and letting it sync to your Photo Stream makes it appear immediately on your iPad too!) The battery life is superb compared to my iPhone, and it’s much easier to type on. However, my iPad is wifi-only, so I only bother bringing it if I’m reasonably sure there’s going to be wifi. Most all-day tech conferences will provide it, and you should be good if an evening event is in a co-working space. (Obviously, if your tablet can use data, you’re good to go!)

But wifi and even data connectivity at a tech conference can be pretty spotty at times. (It’s not uncommon for reception to be awful in the middle of a hotel’s conference hall.) I set up Twitter via SMS on my phone, so even if Twitter won’t load fully, I can still send tweets as text messages. Text messages take a laughably minuscule amount of data to send. One bar will be enough. You have to turn on character counts and monitor it, so you don’t go over 140 characters. Even then, it will sometimes split up tweets strangely, so caveat emptor:

Yeah Pomona Q&A: asking #RayKurzweil about tech, innovation, and Ma
— Anita 💪🏻 Cheng (@anitaycheng) February 8, 2017

rxism! ✌🏻
— Anita 💪🏻 Cheng (@anitaycheng) February 8, 2017

Yeah, I have no idea what happened there.

You can use emojis tweeting via SMS, but I advise against sending photos that way. It does work and attach to the tweet correctly (and heh, I tested it while writing this very blog post!), but it takes a lot of data connectivity. Why even bother using SMS then? It takes a long 30 seconds to send one image, and I could have been composing another tweet!

I type fastest on my laptop, but I only use my computer when I’m live-tweeting a webinar, which happens periodically with Designer Hangout AMAs and UserTesting.com webinars. You need to be able to switch applications without losing audiovisual, after all. It also allows you to take screenshots of the webinar screen and attach them to tweets. I’m partial to the Tweetdeck app, but you could use anything you like. Tracking hashtags is easiest on a computer, but it’s normally too much firepower for live-tweeting an event. Plus, you can’t take photos of a meatspace presentation using your laptop unless you REALLY want to make yourself look foolish! I’ve also learned that trying to sync images between the iPhone and MacBook with the Photos app is AWFUL, so don’t even bother. Seriously. If you want to sync photos, do it between an iPhone and iPad.

Here are the environments I’ve encountered, from most common to least common, and the choices I would make:

1-3-hr in-person event, with or without wifi
- Phone using Twitter app. Use SMS if slow
All-day in-person event, with wifi
- iPad with keyboard using Twitter app. Phone (on low power mode) for photos using Twitter app, and backup for SMS tweeting if slow. Bring a battery pack!
All-day in-person event, without wifi
- Phone (on low power mode) with SMS tweeting, avoid photos. Bring a fully-charged battery pack!
Online webinar, on wifi
- Laptop using Tweetdeck

With that taken care of, let’s get down to brass tacks:

Before each event

1. Confirm the speaker’s Twitter handle, so you can use it throughout the talk.

Speakers love support and attention! They’d want to know that people are listening to them and learning from their efforts. If you’re new to tech, now you’ve put your name on the map with them. They’ll also often retweet you if you write something really informative, so their followers will see what you’re doing.

You have to confirm their Twitter handle because some people have common names, and you might select the wrong handle. I have done that before, and it’s not a good look.

Some speakers don’t have their names in their handle at all, or don’t use Twitter that often. You’ll have to do some sleuthing to see if you’ve got the right person. There have been multiple instances where I didn’t know the speaker’s handle, then discovered it halfway through the talk and added it to subsequent tweets. This isn’t ideal because as I mentioned, each tweet has to be as self-contained as possible.

2. Along with the speaker’s handle, confirm the event hashtag, if there is one. (If not, use the organizer’s Twitter handle.)

Most large tech-related events, especially conferences, will have an event hashtag. This is the fastest way you’ll get the attention of the organizers, and find other fun, opinionated people at the event too! Also, if there is a Twitter contest, you need to use the event hashtag to get counted.

For small one-time talks, there often isn’t an event hashtag. In such instances, I’ll use the organizer’s handle to get on their radar. But if you tweet enough using one hashtag, it’ll catch on anyway, bwahaha.

This is more important if I’m tweeting on behalf of organizations like UXPALA, UX+DEV Summit, World IA Day LA, and IA Summit. Sponsors are important to mitigate the cost of events and promote the events within their networks. The least we could do is give them some love!

At #WUD16LA at @gophilosophie having tacos! 🌮 Thx to sponsors @riotgames @DigitalKarmaLLC @onwardsearch @OReillyMedia pic.twitter.com/Peaz170Zof
— UXPALA (@UXPALA) November 11, 2016

4. Get an idea of what the talk will be about, before the event.

Right before the talk begins, I like to write an intro tweet about what the subject is, so people following the event hashtag has some idea of what I’ll be tweeting about, before being subject to the barrage. Writing it on the fly is more difficult than if you already have it planned out!

Re: the #ias16 theme "a broader panorama", keynote speaker @lwelchman works w/ teams & ppl, so let's talk about diversity in tech!
— UXPALA (@UXPALA) May 6, 2016

Something new we’re trying at World IA Day Los Angeles 2017, is a Google Sheet where we have all the handles, hashtags, and summaries ready to go. That way, everyone doing social media can all work off the same information, and I can ensure that I can easily copy-paste it when I need it!

Having all of this info saves so much time searching on the fly!

During the event

1. Find a seat near the middle of the room.

This is more important for talks with slides. There might be a good image or diagram that you want to share. If you sit too close, you sometimes can’t get the entire slide in the photo, depending on the size of the screen. If you sit too far or too off to the side, you can’t get a good angle. My iPhone 5S’s camera isn’t the best, so I need to give it as much help as I can.

2. Copy the speaker’s handle and event hashtag with your device, so you can paste it at the end of every tweet.

This saves so much typing, seriously. Sometimes you’ll go back and forth with links, so you’ll have to re-copy that text. Still worth it!

3. Focus on the intros and conclusions of the talk’s main points.

This is definitely something that gets easier once you’ve heard some talks and can track the structure in real-time. The information that is most impactful to tweet are intros and conclusions, which are usually instructional. You can ignore most supporting content, unless it’s very compelling data that would surprise people. I’m usually composing tweets while the speaker is explaining something in detail or giving specific examples.

This is an example of an “intro tweet,” which gives context and potential scope of impact.

In CA, Prop 47 gave 2 mil ppl 2nd chance, by allowing some charges erased from record. But clearing it is hard! @jazmynlatimer #cfasummit
— Anita 💪🏻 Cheng (@anitaycheng) November 3, 2016

This is an example of a “concluding tweet,” which presents the scope of impact. Sometimes I’ll add my own conclusion to finish the point.

100 ppl going back to work = $55 mil in lifetime earnings. Better for residents & society! @JazmynLatimer #cfasummit
— Anita 💪🏻 Cheng (@anitaycheng) November 3, 2016

4. But if there’s a funny quote, definitely tweet it!

The funny quotes often get the best engagement, but even ignoring that, you gotta have some fun and give people some entertainment along with your information!

"We can fix broken hearts now. Not from romance, that'll still take some work in VR." #RayKurzweil #biotechnology
— Anita 💪🏻 Cheng (@anitaycheng) February 8, 2017

5. Fall in love with active voice and short words.

140 characters isn’t a lot. Passive voice uses extra words to say the same thing than a more direct, active voice does. Nobody will be impressed at your long words if you can’t tweet it at all because you can’t fit the long words in. Write casually, write directly, and drop propositions or pronouns if you must, as long as your tweet still makes sense by itself. Information and actionable thrust is more important than perfect grammar.

If you can quickly use an emoji for a concept, do it. Arrows and smiley faces are your friend!

❌credibility ❌reliability ❌trust ❌ethics if no individual practice or procedure @KyleAverack #SoCalUXCamp
— UXPALA (@UXPALA) August 6, 2016

6. If a speaker mentions something that exists online, go find it.

This is more of a pro-tip for when you get more adept at live-tweeting, because it requires switching between your browser and Twitter. If speaker mentions someone else’s idea or quote, see if they have a Twitter handle so you can “@” them in your tweet. Remember, people are on Twitter because they want to make an impact. Let them know they’ve made an impact!

.@nireyal quotes @bjfogg re: motivation. PDF paper here: http://t.co/I2hzLIET0k #MedX
— Anita 💪🏻 Cheng (@anitaycheng) March 14, 2014

If it’s a book, I’ll do a quick Amazon search so I can link it. If it’s an article, a quick Google search will usually take me there. This makes it easier for anyone reading your tweets – they just have to click through. And it definitely improves engagement!

.@Sean_Van_Tyne recs hallway tests for quick user testing: https://t.co/cenGB87Jfn #SoCalUXCamp
— UXPALA (@UXPALA) August 6, 2016

7. Use your device’s built-in camera app.

Some time ago, Twitter removed the ability to zoom-in with their in-app camera. This is very annoying when you’re trying to take a photo of a slide and you happen to be in the back of the room. Cropping with Twitter’s photo editing feature take forever, so you’re better off using the device’s built-in camera app and attaching it to the tweet afterwards. Though, Twitter’s built-in filters can quickly improve contrast on slides, so that’s a plus!

8. Context, context, context!

If you’re tweeting a photo of a slide, you have to give it some context of what it’s showing.

Design & financial planning not all that different, just the end product! -Claudia McCowan #MoneyMatters pic.twitter.com/biOC4QVjhU
— UXPALA (@UXPALA) December 1, 2016

Anyone can take a picture of a slide and post it, but you can go the extra mile and explain what they’re looking at. Go right for impact and conclusion of the slide. Remember, each tweet has to be self-contained!

After the event

Before I leave, I like to give one last shout-out tweet to the speaker, the organizers, and the sponsors. It lets your followers know what you’re done too.

Thanks for coming #wud16la! Speakers @zerowasteguy1 @pindiespace @tysonwoeste sponsors @gophilosophie @riotgames @onwardsearch @OReillyMedia
— UXPALA (@UXPALA) November 11, 2016

Arturo Perez from Kluge suggested using Wakelet (before, it was Storify) for my live tweets, which I’ve started using so I can refer back to past events. I wish I knew this before 2016, because I have yeeeeaaars of live-tweeting backlog to archive. I’ve downloaded my Twitter archive and use the links to embed the posts one-by-one. Procrastinating on other things (ahemjobhunting) seems to be a good time to do it. But it’s a great way of showing people the kind of tweeting I do, so you might as well start early!

It’s been fascinating seeing how I’ve developed as a live tweeter, and what events I’ve chosen to live-tweet – how it’s changed from graphic design to UX to product management. Early on, I was doing one tweet every 5 minutes, and now I can go at one a minute for hours. I hope these tips give you a head-start. The more useful information we can share with others, the better we can leverage technology to help everyone!

GovTech, the job you never thought you’d love

2017-01-24T00:00:00Z

Psssst. Hey. Hey you. You new-grad/career-changer/just-curious looking into this coding stuff. I bet you’ve heard how hot the technology sector is, how it’s so easy to find a job. At the same time, you’ve also heard (and vehemently disagree with) the assertion that people nowadays, not just Millennials, only care about themselves and getting theirs. You want to do more with your life, you want to make a difference. You want to change the world. You wonder if maybe tech isn’t for your do-gooding nature, since it’s all about social media and cat videos now. Or it’s about going into the rat race of startups and venture capitalism, hoping someone will give you a minuscule chance to change the world.

There’s something out there that can give you a real chance to change the lives of real people, right now. It’s called government. Yes, you’ve probably heard that government has the worst red tape, that everyone’s lazy and nothing ever gets done. (And now there’s the variable of a new administration. More on that later…)

I know, I’ve been there too. That’s why I initially worked at startups, but again and again, the lack of money always limited what I could do (or even if I could show up). Then an interesting opportunity fell into my lap – information architecture organizing website content for the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS). Intrigued at the chance of working for the citizenry, and a steady paycheck, I gave it a shot. And after an amazing two years where I introduced basic user experience (UX) processes, got a seat at some important tables, discovered my leadership skills, and learned some lifelong collaboration lessons, I’m here to tell you that government technology services is THE place to be. (And yup, the featured image above is indeed the view from our breakroom!)

Here are the reasons why:

1. You’ll be solving real problems for real people.

There is no struggling to find a market fit, there’s no “just make things look sexy so it’ll stand out from the millions of apps in the App Store.” Our customers have no choice. If you live in the City of Los Angeles and you want to remodel your house, you have to come to us. And because there’s no need to wave your arms getting attention in a crowd, you can go right to the pure service aspect of what you’re solving for.

So there’s only two choices – continue to let things be bad, or to help. Whatever you can do to help is going to help hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people on day 1. That’s a guarantee. You’re never going to be irrelevant.

And honestly, it doesn’t matter to us who’s in charge. Whoever’s in the White House (or governor’ office, or mayor’s office) is not doing away with building code or the power grid. People will always need certain services from their government. Most of those services could use technology to bring it faster to constituents, no matter what level. And they all desperately need your help.

2. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit available for picking.

Government is finally starting to catch up in not only technologies, but software development processes like Agile. A few are even starting to adopt user-centered processes, but even so, they still need help implementing them. Think of government like enterprise, except 100x more complex!

The vast majority of government software is a good 10-15 years behind current consumer expectations, if it even exists at all. I have a super-techie contractor friend who praises Los Angeles’s online permitting system and thinks of it as the gold standard for permitting in Southern California, even with the confusing navigation and flow. It’s because LADBS emails you a completed permit application as a PDF once you submit the online form. That’s it. It uses your online form submission to fill in an otherwise-complex PDF application and hands it to you.

Even simple stuff like that is greatly appreciated, because most government services aren’t even up to that level. He demonstrated another city’s permitting form where you submitted it and it….just went into the ether. “Maybe I’ll get a phone call 3 days from now about this permit I just submitted. Maybe.”

Sometimes I feel like I’m getting away with something, because this is my first full-time job in tech and I have so much influence. I’ve been told by other designers that it must be like “trial by fire” for a new UXer to be in government, and I’m like, “Are you kidding? Whatever I do will be 1000x better than what currently exists!” Who gets to say that in today’s competitive consumer marketplace?

3. If you know your stuff and get things done, you’ll get respect and autonomy.

The procurement and development processes are broken in government. It’s readily acknowledged, and the extent of which it needs help is far beyond the scope of this essay, and probably the essay form in general.

All that is to say, government doesn’t have the resources to babysit you. If you sit around waiting for someone to tell you what to do, you’ll end up sitting around for weeks waiting for “stuff to do.” (Which may end up being the wrong thing to do, because government is so behind in adopting development processes anyway!) But if you come in offering solutions and then make them happen, you’ll earn trust and respect among your colleagues and managers. That will give you leeway in how you get your work done, and lessen presentation stress.

After getting sick of the back-and-forth in getting the LADBS.org redesign up and running, I finally took responsibility for it, put on the product manager (and developer) hats, and had it online in less than a year where it had floundered for 3 years in limbo. Despite the lack of experience on my resume, I got it done.

Now they bring me onto projects that aren’t just the website, even though technically my job title is “Website Content Supervisor.” Is there a workflow of a new service or application that needs clarification? They know to call me in.

Again, this is my first tech job, and I’m encouraged to delegate the more tedious metadata work (the boring side of information architecture) to other people, because they want me focusing on workflows. Our department head has looked me right in the eye during meetings with other managers and asked, “Anita, what do you think?” And listens.

Not only does government need help from technologists, but they truly want our help as well, which is even more important. If you can contribute meaningfully, they’ll give you lots of opportunities to spread your wings.

I’ve learned to speak up, and to cater my communication methods depending on the stakeholder. All of those are essential leadership skills for a UXer. (Yup, getting to do leadership stuff at my first tech job!) I’ve learned that people appreciate my expertise, and my willingness to lay everything on the table.

I’ve also learned that people appreciate stupid/basic questions from me. I’ve proven myself. I get things done, over and over again. If I’m asking that kind of question, that means A) I’m paying attention and B) I care enough to make sure I completely understand what’s going on. And believe me, it’s very freeing to be able to ask whatever pops into your head and not worry about how you come off!

Admittedly, government is not the place for someone who wants to come in at a junior level and be shown the ropes on everything. There’s simply not the bandwidth for that. But if you’re chomping at the bit to show how much you know and can do, the door’s open!

4. Looking for work/life balance? It’s here.

For the general public, the technology sector is associated with young white men. And that’s because all the sexy news about companies blowing up overnight in popularity are about startups, which tend to lean very young, white, and male. (And rich, but again….another topic for another day.)

But all kinds of folks learn IT and programming. Not all of them yearn for the gambling and rat race lifestyles of startups. Say what you want about government, but it’s a steady paycheck. It often doesn’t pay as well as the private sector, but generally, once you’re in, you’re in until you decide to leave. So people decide they can live a life while working here.

Over half of my coworkers are married with kids. Having to take a day off because your child is sick won’t be met with looks of bewilderment among your bar-hopping early-20-something colleagues.

My mom (a programmer herself) jokes about the “7-11” startup life, because those are often your hours, 7am-11pm. Not in government. We have something called overtime pay! The office empties pretty much after 5:30pm, so people can go home to their families. (Or in my case of introversion, decompress.) (Oh, and all federal holidays off. Yeah, I’d forgotten those existed too!)

About half of the managers here are women. Obviously, our voices count if some of us are actually calling the shots!

Overall, this is by far the most diverse group of people I’ve ever worked with. White men are actually the minority. Most people are over 30. It’s impossible to feel like you’re cut off from the rest of the world in a bubble of extreme privilege, because there simply isn’t one here.

5. Government can be startup-level fast, given the right incentives.

Government, compared to startups, has a bad rap of being very slow. Which isn’t without merit, but it’s slow for reasons people get wrong.

Let me get one thing out of the way – government employees are not lazy. More often than not, I see people literally running around trying to fix something that’s broken. If a project has slowed to a crawl, it’s because the workflow is extremely inefficient. Too much back-and-forth between departments is required to get stuff done. And there’s only so much nagging I can do about something, before even an efficiency-focused person like me has to throw up her hands and go, “It’ll happen when it happens!” (Then your job is to prepare for that moment when you’re needed. Great excuse/opportunity for checking out design podcasts and webinars!)

But at the same time, government can be VERY fast. Notably, if there’s a just-passed law requiring a technology service and there’s a set date later in the month, on the books, at which said service needs to be available. Oh ho, then any dilly-dallying disappears and the focus is on shipping!

(We just had a project like this, and I estimated that our timeline needed an extra month or two to have shipped it comfortably.)

Is being reactive to just-passed laws the best way to do things? Of course not, but if you had crossed out government because it wasn’t fast and exciting like startups, put it back on your list!

Know thyself

Like any organization, government isn’t a perfect place to work across the board. You can’t force anyone to accept the kind of change that technology adoption requires.

First, they have to be ready. Ready to focus on customer experience, and ready to change the way they work. Chances are, it won’t be completely smooth sailing even then, but if that willingness isn’t already there, you’re going absolutely nowhere. Period. Keep looking until you find a receptive group.

Even more importantly, you have to decide if you’re ready. Working in a large organization, whether enterprise or government, isn’t for everyone.

You’ll need patience and a long-term vision.

The existing processes that have been in place for years, won’t be able to change suddenly. Even when people are ready for change, it’s difficult to switch what you’ve been doing. Just the reality.

You’ll need to work with that, and be able to orient yourself when a project that’s spent months in limbo suddenly comes back to life. You need to be ready for that opportunity.

There will be weeks where you think you haven’t been very productive, but “slow and steady wins the race” will have to become your mantra. Celebrating small wins, even when things still aren’t perfect, is paramount to overall progress.

You have to know your stuff, or learn it very quickly.

As mentioned before, government (similarly to startups) doesn’t have the bandwidth to babysit you. You have to come in with the knowledge to contribute on day 1, as well as the capability of learning what you need to get the job done. If it’s simply beyond your capability, you have to know who to ask to help, or come up with contingencies.

I came in pretty comfortable with information architecture, as well as HTML/CSS/jQuery to help with the immediate need of organizing the website content. I expected I’d have to learn the new content management system on the job. But after I was hired, I realized what they actually needed—someone who made sure the new website actually got online and was maintainable by non-developers. So I picked up Visual Studio, ASP.NET, and MVC to get into the nitty gritty of the actual codebase. I wouldn’t call myself an expert in any of them, but I learned enough to do what I needed to do.

And even after launch, I took the project further by learning Section 508 accessibility requirements, for web as well as PDF. That’s an ongoing project for sure, especially with 860+ documents, but by learning it myself and training others, we’ll have a strong base of knowledge from which to work from.

You’ll need to become a partner, not just a consultant.

I once asked Jared Spool how to approach a redesign of enterprise software that was 5-10 years old. His answer: Never forget that someone initially designed it. It was most likely a developer, but someone made design decisions about it.

What that means, is that you can’t go whinging about how awful the existing design is. Especially in government, when the developer who made the existing application is probably still around and working with you! That gets awkward pretty fast!

It means you have to do more than just prescribe changes. It means you have to be a true partner. It means leveraging the years of knowledge and experience these developers have picked up working in the department, and on that application.

Some of my most fulfilling projects at LADBS have been working directly with developers. They know things about the department, about the processes, and about the systems that I’d have no prayer of knowing even if I was the best designer in the world. I treat them like experts, because they are experts.

Collaboration has never been more relevant than in government. You are not a rockstar designer, you’re someone who can help make the best government services possible (given existing constraints!). The developers know their applications could be better designed. They need someone who can help them do that, and are not just there to stroke their own egos.

Join us

Technology can connect people to information, and other people, faster than ever. Leveraging technology to improve services for everyone is the pinnacle of its capabilities. Being in government, despite its slow adoption rate, has taught me the power of technology’s reach to help others.

If all this sounds good, and you live in Los Angeles, come check out LADBS’s booth at TechFair LA this Thursday (1/26/17) 11am-8pm and meet us! It’s about time government put itself on the map of technology-minded people. We’re doing cool stuff, I promise! And we need good people to help.

This blog post was inspired by Dan Hon’s fiery tweetstorm about working for California state government. (Check out state-level jobs on the California Dept of Technology’s Github!) Whether on the state level, federal level, or local level, there’s always something we technologists can do!

Evenings at the Loft - Empathy

2016-11-18T00:00:00Z

Dawn Ressel

Was 1 of 3 designers at Intuit to 500 devs! Needed to have them empathize with customer makes for a stronger product.

Intuit’s mission is to improve the customer’s financial experience so much “they can't go back to the old way.”

Devs can be a powerful source of innovation because “they know what's possible.” Get them to feel the customer pain!

Stage 1 of getting devs on board with customer experience—“Understand and Embrace.” Bring customer feedback to devs.

Stage 2: “Practice and build muscle.” Coach and help! No need to turn devs into UX researchers, just have them understand the customer.

Stage 3: Skill building. Helping recruit customers with advanced skills building.

Have people understand CPA pain—boxes and boxes of paperwork! How to get devs to understand it without having to be a CPA? Try analogous experiences with surveys. Sorting documents manually, even for categories we understand, really suck! (So is nagging clients!)

Doing the activity in groups means you can do debriefs after. Analogous activities need prototyping too! The CPA activity took 4-5 rounds.

Training leadership to interview customers allows all to feel customer pain, especially since they’re decision-makers. This allows execs to go beyond “if you're not coding, you're not productive.”

Workshops to build empathy design skills empowers. Setting up customer office hours (after recruiting) allows employees to chat.

Final thoughts about nurturing empathy in your company:

Expect a wide range of reactions, including skepticism and apathy.
Identify your champions and leverage them.
Managing the logistics
- Tap into existing channels and operating mechanisms whenever possible
- Introduce rigor about the programs
Get executive sponsorship
Be patient and flexible

Joseph Lee

Empathy is the reason for design thinking and is not a soft skill.

Sci-fi shows the future we want for ourselves, but the values are of the current times.

1960s Star Trek valued intellect over emotion. Current Star Trek values emotion. Spock learns emotion now.

Emotion research started in the 1980s with Paul Ekman. We all have the same core emotions.

People studied mental illness, but now often focus on happiness.

Joseph name-drops Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and puts “internet” at the base. 😂

There are 3 basic needs for happiness: competency, autonomy, and relationships.

When we’re born, we need care from others. This doesn’t go away in adulthood, but others help fulfill.

Empathy is our “biological human interface”—what we feel in a moment of need, honed through evolution.

Empathy allows us to experience true reality, to experience something through another. When our needs are met, we are happy. When they aren’t, we are sad.

“Whether we acknowledge it or not, empathy is at the foundation of every interaction we have.”

Empathy isn’t putting yourself in other’s shoes. (“I wouldn't have voted for that guy!”) But it's “why do they feel that way?”

“It's the feeling you feel with other people.” Mirror neurons map neurons of other people, then activates yours.

“It takes nothing. We’re born this way.” Babies can mirror expressions within 20 minutes of birth.

Talent + effort = skill + effort = accomplishment. Effort will trump talent!

Bern Irizarry

Bern says that empathy is just good business, though it’s a buzzword now. But is it just a buzzword? The battle now is Corporate U.S. vs Empathy.

There’s real science in empathy, with fMRI images involving empathy and distressing images.

But there are also various definitions of empathy. Bern cites Indi Young’s work:

Most immediate and universal empathy is emotional empathy. Not replicable, but cognitive empathy (motivation) is.

The confusion between sympathy and empathy:

Brené Brown’s video of sympathy vs empathy is a great intro!

A test in Simon Baron-Cohen’s book “Zero Degrees of Empathy” showed someone’s level of EQ had nothing to do with one’s job.

What made good business throughout history:

Community
Scale
Expertise
Experience (in the present)

Empathy matters in products, teams, and life. You need to draw from people to get ideas for your solutions.

Bern says that empathy is an important part of design, and cites Jon Kolko’s book.

User research is often already limited with interviews and surveys. Open it up and do empathetic listening. Let them lead the convo—you will go places you never planned originally!

Listening means finding the patterns people talk about. “There won’t be a smoking gun.”

Good teams empathize with each other. Go from “me” to “we.”

Live empathetically and have others live it with you. Live heroically!

Designer Hangout AMA - The Business of UX

2016-11-15T00:00:00Z

Crowdcast link to the original webinar

Bobby Meeks from Autozone started out when UX was called “customer advocacy,” designing nurses stations in hospitals. Then onto FedEx and accessibility.

Bobby has a great boss at Autozone. You have to have an executive sponsor who knows design and business!

He learned design thinking from peers, conferences, and webinars. Soak up all you can!

For UX culture change, you need:

Top-level exec sponsoring design (it’ll take time!)
Allies on the ground.
A need to change the world!

Autozone nurtures growth in the company, but loses customer focus in the process. “Personas are key to engaging the audience.” Personas communicate user research to executives, and make them empathize with customer. And execs love to share their knowledge!

Being patient with managers during culture change in the hardest thing. Get them engaged! “This will be a long meeting!”

Executives are used to their own silos. “Let them talk,” then decide where they best fit.

A company that’s “too much design-centric” is a nice problem to have! The best designers trust limitations and feedback.

“Get 3 ideas, don’t be bothered if they hate it.” -advice from Bobby’s former boss. Give them 1 to 2 to have, they’ll pick one!

The person who reins in designers has to be their boss.

Designers have to face reality of the business solution. “Who is the biggest moneymaker?” Is the solution worth it?

Get personas into the convo, so you have a place to start with execs.

Many times, the “resources to make things happen just aren’t there” regarding maintenance. You need patience, it’s tough!

When you have a client already with concrete features, it’s a “tough spot! Depends on what you’re paid to do.” Do sticky note exercise voting.

Good UX is expensive. It involves delicate relationship of confidence and trust.

Client who already with concrete features—“tough spot! Depends on what you’re paid to do.” Do sticky note exercise voting.

Good UX is expensive, it involves delicate relationship of confidence and trust.

Business owners and designers need to trust each other for success together. Pick relationships over little battles.

“People don’t like being told they’re stupid!” You have to trust the design process. “Never shoot anything down!”

Bobby mentions Airbnb changing star to heart—engagement ⬆️ 30%! It’s about relationships.

Rapid prototyping with tools like Sketch or Invision is the future. Get good tools, but it depends on needs. “Every musician needs to find their own instrument.” So many low-cost tools out there to prototype with.

“Everything starts out with a sketch on paper.” Though Bobby Meeks can do a quick Sketch prototype in 30 min. That’s important to execs! Execs “love shiny objects” to justify their UX dept. Use the right tool to show audience. YMMV!

Inventorying features and getting execs engaged in prioritizing them is important. Hard to get them together, but worth it!

Years of design experience gives you good intuition about who you’re designing for.

Legacy is hard on longtime employees! Restricts design but “something to be said for old things that just work.”

“If you have to persuade your direct manager, they don’t really trust you.” Need more time or work or vision. C-suite execs need research and financial proof. Do that research!

If it’s a great UX and will help the customer, “you don’t really need to sell it.”

You always need to make a case for anything that costs money. Sell you, sell your experience to get resources. Since Bobby’s work at Autozone is in-stores, he can pop into the stores and do impromptu user research!

“You need healthy respect with what can and can’t be done with tech” Know code, but focus hard if you do both at once.

“How do I make it easy for someone who’s never sold car parts to sell it to a customer who doesn’t know cars?” re: Autozone work.

A company who assumes direct customer feedback equals UX is tough. “You gotta jump on it. Work on it while you can, later.”

“Beating the accessibility drum” gets people paying attention. But selling to execs requires empathy. Test, make sure design is compliant yourself.

For gauging actual user reactions and not opinions, Bobby uses Screencast-o-matic. Watch for facial reactions, and mouse-hovering! Users often still their mouse when confused. Definitely do not ask users if they like something—they’ll say yes to move on.

“If you’re battling selling yourself to someone who has no idea what you’re selling, anything you do will sound sales pitch-y.” This is why top-level exec buy-in is so important!)

Re: evangelizing UX in tough environment: “patience is power.” Plant seed, leave it time to grow. Give people tools. “We UXers all have each other’s backs!”

SoCal Code Camp 2016

2016-11-12T00:00:00Z

SoCal Code Camp 2016 took place at USC, which was nice because it was a quick train ride on the Expo Line. This was my second time speaking, and I learned a ton! Every time I go and do this, it gets easier. (Hence all the Toastmaster-ing!)

SoCal Code Camp is great because they open it up to absolutely anyone who wants to give a talk. One speaker I met at lunch didn’t quite realize that it was literally “Whatever you propose, we’ll schedule.” She submitted four talks, thinking only one of them would be accepted…and ended up giving all four! You gotta be careful!

Normally, you’d think that opening up a conference to a bunch of non-professional speakers would be a disaster, but that’s the funny thing about public speaking. The ones who volunteer to speak in front of their peers take the responsibility very seriously! There’s always a lot of great information to learn. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s technically-minded and wants to give public speaking a try.

This year, all the UX/PM talks happened to be on Saturday morning. A casual UX/PM track of sorts! Here are my tweets from the other talks relating to UX/PM that don’t pertain to mine…

Developers, Designers and PMs: Agile collaboration for a better product (Tom Vignard)

Bad teams don’t communicate, trust, or collaborate. They aren’t engaged, and aren't dedicated. It puts the project at risk! Example of a dream team that didn’t work - “The Big Four” at the Lakers! Ego problems, no collaboration.

Great teams communicate, trust, collaborate; have vision, passion, have fun. Impact projects positively!

What drives a product manager? Good KPIs, deliver cool features with no defects.

What drives a designer? Understanding big picture, using creative process, having flexibility, looks good!

What drives devs? “No blockers,” clear requirements, leaning/growth, fiddling in new tech!

Putting it all together: what makes a great team:

Shared goals and ownership
- Big pictures/vision (roadmapping that brings everyone to the table to ask “Is this feasible?”)
- Clear requirements (moving with backlog)
- Ownership and shared accountability
Innovation
- Shorter iterations
- Try things with low risk
- Cool features
- New technologies
- Creative process
Growth
- Learning, growth, with opportunity to learn from each other (paired programming)
- Brainstorming
Collaboration
- Agile small (5 to 7) for better communication
- Ownership
- Brainstorming
- “No blockers”
Results
- Features delivery (easier with Agile) since success is momentum
- KPIs
- No defects

Unless ppl talk to each other, they might have diff ideas of what’s going on. Get together and document!

What can you do right now? Talk (not email), connect with people, ask questions, share ideas, help others! Lessons from Tony Robbins: "Trade your expectations for appreciations.” Do more for others to become more yourself.

If you do these 5 things, your team will be engaged, passionate, self-driven, happy, successful!

Clarify your reqs by drilling down to “jobs to be done.” “As a [user], I want to [do X] so I can [achieve X].”

Programmer Productivity (Philip Yurchuk)

For programmer productivity, interruptions suck and reusability is golden.

Multitasking makes tasks longer—kills momentum & focus. When on vacation, go on vacation. No work for a week!

Have daily standup meetings: what you did yesterday, will do today, any problems? (But don’t solve problems then!)

2-min rule for Getting Things Done by David Allen: if a task takes less than 2 minutes, just do it now!

Interruptions the equivalent of multitasking, because it breaks focus and momentum. Jeff Atwood (cofounder of Stack Overflow) says interruptions are equal to -10 IQ. Kathy Sierra did research about quality of work while multitasking—it goes down! Multitasking is ok for habits or when you don’t need to think. But if you aren’t thinking on your job, you need a new job!

Programmers have downtime during compile time. (XKCD comic about compile downtime. But you can still waste time waiting for compiling. Why not lower build time, or set up notifications?

Philip suggests mindful meditation to improve focus. Take two to three 8-minute breaks per day.

Private office FTW, since it increases focus. And open plan offices increases illness by 60-70%. “Not even cubicles, or sneeze guards!”

To reduce noise, put down carpet, acoustic foam, pink noise generators (i.e. background voices). Headphones are not a solution! Listening to music you like often changes your brain’s pattern-matching abilities.

Interrupting your coworkers costs them 15 minutes after you leave! Exceptions: if it’s gonna save you more than 30 min, or if it’s talking to vendor! “We’ve paid them to interrupt them!”

Block out the hours in your calendar for “coding time” to achieve flow state.

Communication has 2 aspects: latency (immediacy) & bandwidth (info context). High bandwidth means lower error rate. Don’t send a text when you’re mad! Pick up the phone.

Minimize miscommunication by using “ubiquitous language.” Martin Fowler (author of Software Development) thinks of it as “unambiguous language.”

Philip promotes the “Voltron developer” concept, where you get all developers using 1 style, best practices. Start with the developer with the cleanest code. Anything that isn’t creative should be reflexive and automatic. Learn from the same source, know the idioms and style guides. He suggests using “n-1” employee strategy. Intentionally keep headcount low and spend the extra money on training or consultants. (Since the greatest cost for companies is salary anyway, build your team from the inside!)

Have a buddy system for your code. It helps if you’re on vacation and sharing the “cool stuff.”

There is no programming silver bullet, except for reuse! For build vs buy decision, buy and configure always wins.

EnterpriseUX at SoCalUX Camp 2015

2015-08-15T00:00:00Z

We’re in UX to help people

UXers think, “This is bullshit, and I want to help fix this.”

UX has to recruit all other team members to get buy-in

Book rec: It’s Our Research by Erika Hall.

Always fight for research, otherwise the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) will kick your ass.

Enterprise needs to move slowly and not break their legacy tech

Enterprise doesn’t have the luxury of using a scorched earth strategy when dealing with legacy tech.

Think of the long game. Build relationships with your stakeholders. Build a design roadmap to keep yourself on track as you compromise in the current product.

Compromise shitty legacy tech with unicorn design. Make a unicorn out of trash, aka a “trashicorn.”

Test with your customers

Use data-informed design. Data analytics is helpful, but won’t tell you the why.

How to find users to test with:

Recruit the sales team (could also help with how much to pay them too)
Hit up LinkedIn groups
Use market research agencies
Go guerilla! Hit up personal networks, cold-call.

Ask “Why?”

2014-11-12T00:00:00Z

Ever feel so tired and stressed, you can’t figure out how you ended up doing what you’re doing? Between work and/or school, family, friends, errands of adult life, we are running from one thing to another, not having a second to stop and take a breather. We just can’t afford the time.

“It’s just the realities of adult life,” we tell ourselves. Adulthood means doing things we don’t want to do.

We tell ourselves that life nowadays is better, because we have more choices. Expectations are not that strict as they were when it comes to careers, children, where to live, what to do for fun. We have freedom! But do we really?

I believe it’s time to rethink adulthood, and bring back some lessons from childhood.

The truth is, today’s world has so many ways to compare our lives to others. There are lifestyle magazines, business blogs, reality shows, not to mention social media. We keep up with what everyone is doing, and we consciously or unconsciously want to keep up. There’s an actual term for that now: FOMO, the fear of missing out.

We have endless possibilities to model ourselves after. But in doing so, we can lose sight of what we really want for ourselves.

Let’s put the brakes on adulthood, and go back to that annoying little kid we all once were. That annoying little kid that always asked the same question. “Why?”

But instead of annoying other people, let’s annoy ourselves. Say, you’re just really tired every Wednesday night, are a little frazzled having to write your speeches and practice them, and having a meeting after a full day’s work.

So you ask yourself, “Why? Why am I here at Toastmasters today?”

And everyone will have a different answer. “The people are nice.” “It’s a nice break from work.” “I really need to practice my public speaking.” “I need to practice my listening skills.”

And then go you deeper. “Why do I need to practice my public speaking?” “I’ll need to make more presentations at work.” “Why do I care how my work presentations go?” “I want a promotion, or I want to earn more money, or I want to look good in front of my boss.” Or whatever it is!

Keep asking why until you have an answer that either motivates you further, or maybe have you decide it’s actually not that important to you. Then you can decide whether to take it off your long list of responsibilities. We don’t need yet another thing! This will make our lives less busy, and more meaningful. We will be doing what we want to do, or at least be on the right path.

We’ll have different answers, which is the point. We’re all different. What works for other people, may not work for us.

So when you notice that you’ve been unhappy for a while, take a breather. Be that annoying little kid again, and ask yourself why.

This was originally a speech I gave at Crown City Toastmasters.

Git for non-developers (and total newbies)

2014-10-05T00:00:00Z

Update in 2023: A lot of things have changed since I originally wrote this! Most of it still holds true, but now there's GitHub Desktop which serves most of my content-updating needs. I highly recommend this tutorial video from Digital.gov about GitHub and GitHub Desktop.

If you’re just here for the quick references, get right to it!

If you are in any way associated with code, you will likely be tasked to learn Git sooner or later. After all, not all updates to code require a developer’s expertise. If you just need to go in and change some wording to a webpage, your developers will LOVE YOU if you can do it yourself.

After a few of my UX friends said, “I really should learn Git,” I decided writing this blog post would be the thing to do. One thing about free, open-source projects, is that documentation for non-technical people can be rather scarce!

So here is a crash course in Git, primarily for non-developers, just enough to make you useful around full-time developers. The following is about how much I need to know as a UX designer who helps out in front-end code at times. I leave the fancy stuff to the full-time devs, such as the details of how Git actually works. 🙂

What is Git and why do I need to learn it?

Git is the most popular version control system for a coded project. If there is more than one developer working on a project, you need some way to organize and merge the changes so you don’t accidentally overwrite each other’s stuff. Mysteriously disappearing code is probably the fastest way to piss off a dev!

If you’re working on a project on your own, it’s also a good idea to have version control in case one of your changes borks everything and you need to go back to an earlier version. It’s a good way to cover everyone’s asses, basically.

So…what is Git exactly?

Git is software on your computer that tracks changes (“snapshots”) you make to a project, and tracks any changes made to a project that’s on a server off of your computer (“remote”). The snapshots on either end are stored in a hidden folder called a “repository” (or “repo” for short) that’s always named .git in the project.

You can copy an existing Git project from a remote server to your computer (“clone”). You can then easily copy over any changes made in that remote project to your computer (“pull”), so you can have the latest version before you work on it. Then you can just as easily transfer your changes to the remote project (“push”) so everyone can see it.

You can make a copy of the code for your own use and do whatever you want to it, while not having a direct effect on the original project (“fork”).

A Git project may also have many “branches” if the project is complicated and has a lot of moving parts, but if that’s the case, you’ll be told which branch to work from.

Git, in a nutshell

Because of how Git tracks changes, you’ll need to reserve a folder especially for the project you’re working on. Git will track ALL the changes made within the folder that contains the .git folder. Organization is KEY. A Git project folder should not be one where you save angry letters you never sent your ex, because those will be pushed to the remote project as well!

And what is GitHub?

GitHub is a place where developers can store their code publicly using Git. Great for open-source, and sometimes used as a CV for developers. (Someone who works on open source projects and shows it off is someone who loves to code!) Because of that, when you use Git, you’re usually using GitHub as well, but there are other project-hosting sites such as Bitbucket.

The important thing to note is that you’ll have a unique username with Git, so that everyone can track who changed what. It will be shared through all of your Git-related projects. Your Git username will be the one you use for GitHub, Bitbucket, etc.

How do I get started with Git?

First, download Git and install it like any other software. If you wish, make an account on GitHub and be sure to remember your credentials on it.

There is software for Git where you can select files and drag/drop things, but the fastest way to use Git is through the command line: Terminal (Mac) or Command Prompt (Windows). Type in some lines, press enter, and stuff happens in very rapid fashion! When you’re making constant changes (and if constant changes are happening), faster is better!

To use Git for the very first time, you’ll need to add your credentials. Type the following into your command line, pressing “Enter” after each line:

git config --global user.name "YOUR NAME"

git config --global user.email "YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS"

Remember, those have to be the same credentials you use on GitHub and any other project hosting site.

How do I use Git for projects?

If you are not a developer, 99% of the time you will be copying over an existing project to your computer to modify. This is called “cloning.”

Clone

Open up the your command line program, and switch over to the folder you want your project to go in. You do this by typing:

cd [folder path]

On a Mac you can simply drag over the folder from Finder to the Terminal, and it will populate the path name for you.

Next you have to copy the Git clone URL of the remote project (shortened in Git-speak to “remote”). In GitHub, it is here:

Where to find the Git clone URL in GitHub

You clone the project by entering the following in your command line:

git clone [Git clone URL]

This will copy over all the files and folders from the remote to the folder you designated, which will show in the command line after you enter it. The name of the project folder will be the same as the name it has in the remote.

This also sets that URL with the remote name origin, which we will use later to push changes from our computer.

Pull

If you want to update your computer’s version of the project to the latest on the remote, enter:

git pull

This does two things: it updates all the changes made to your remote AND merges any changes with your project. Pretty cool!

But sometimes if you’re on the verge of pushing some big changes, you want to check for remote changes but not merge them into your project quite yet..

Fetch

If you want to check for updates but not merge right away, type in:

git fetch [remote name]

But pulling is okay for most uses, because it fetches and merges at the same time. If you’re working like me and doing front-end while another person does back-end, you don’t usually have to worry about merges that overwrite each other.

Updating the remote

Okay, you’ve made some changes to the code on your computer and you want to update the remote! Here are a few things to note:

When you save your project to your computer, Git does not automatically track the change to the local repo.
You have to “add” any new changes to a virtual staging area that Git has, to gather snapshots of the changes before “committing.”
“Committing” basically says, “This is the set of changes I want to save in my Git history.” Committing will put things on the record, so to say. It’s a finalizing of the changes before you send them off.
After you finalize the changes, you “push” them to the remote.

That was a bunch of tech-splaining in order to justify why we need 3 separate lines of code to update a remote. 😛

Make sure you’re in the right project folder path in your command line, then type the following, pressing “enter” each time after the system updates you:

git add .

git commit -m "[Write something informative about the changes you made here]"

git push

If you’re using GitHub, you’ll sometimes be asked for your credentials. That’s normal.

Usually just git push will do it if you’re in the right project folder and there’s only one “branch” on the remote, but if you want to get more specific, you can use:

git push origin master

origin is the name of the repo you cloned from – it’s set automatically when you cloned it originally. master is the name of the main branch. If the project is simple, it will only have one branch which is the master, so normally you won’t need to specify it. If you’re working in another branch, just replace master with the name of the branch.

If code is being overwritten with your changes, Git will tell you and you can change your own code before overwriting someone else’s stuff. Also a good reason why you should talk freely with your developers!

What it looks like for real….

Here’s what my Terminal looks like after cloning a repo (which was a fork I made from another project, on GitHub) and pushing changes to that remote after making changes.

Note that I only wanted to push changes from that one project, instead of everything from its parent (I have a general GitHub projects folder in my Dropbox). That’s why I changed folders between cloning and pushing. You may be doing something different, so remember to pay attention to which folder you’re working in, in your command line.

anitas-mbp:ParallaxFeaturedImage az$ cd /Users/az/Dropbox/GitHub
anitas-mbp:GitHub az$ git clone https://github.com/AnitaYCheng/Affiliates-Woocoupons.git
Cloning into 'Affiliates-Woocoupons'...
remote: Counting objects: 6, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (5/5), done.
remote: Total 6 (delta 0), reused 6 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (6/6), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
anitas-mbp:GitHub az$ cd /Users/az/Dropbox/GitHub/Affiliates-Woocoupons 
anitas-mbp:Affiliates-Woocoupons az$ git add .
anitas-mbp:Affiliates-Woocoupons az$ git commit -m "Cleared any error messages generated by the plugin"
[master b632819] Cleared any error messages generated by the plugin
 2 files changed, 25 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)
 rewrite README.md (70%)
anitas-mbp:Affiliates-Woocoupons az$ git push
Counting objects: 7, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (4/4), done.
Writing objects: 100% (4/4), 1.06 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 4 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
To https://github.com/AnitaYCheng/Affiliates-Woocoupons
   666b73c..b632819  master -> master

How can I keep track of what I did in Git?

If you’re working hard in the code, you may get up to get a snack and forget where you were in the Git process. Use:

git status

It’ll give you a status report of the Git repo you’re in.

Oh no, Git got messed up! What do I do?

Updated June 5, 2018. I should handle this with a scalpel and not a sledgehammer, haha...

If you already have a project on your computer and Git has messed up somehow, there are several ways to handle it.

The proper way of undoing things

If you want to change your commit message or add some more files (and gosh knows I’ve wanted to before…) try:

git commit --amend

If the changes are local and not committed or pushed, the following will work to undo it:

git reset --hard origin/[branch name]

There’s a lot more to it depending on what you want to do. Head on over to the Git documentation about Undoing Things!

The YOLO method, when things are completely borked and you just want to start over

I’ve tried the following a few times when just wanting to start over. It works for a completely clean slate, but use at your own risk!

Make hidden folders visible (should be in the options in Finder or Windows Explorer), find the .git folder in that project, then delete it. Right from Finder or Windows Explorer is fine!

Then initialize Git again for the project by switching to the project folder in your command line (cd \[folder name\]) and typing the following:

git init

If you do this, you’ll likely also have to set up the remote link for the project, so Git will know where to push changes to. Again, an easy fix:

git remote add origin [Git clone URL]

To check the clone URLs, you can review your remotes with:

git remote -v

The command line will then pop out a list of remote names and their URLs. If you need to change the URL of a remote:

git remote set-url [remote name] [Git clone URL]

Most of the time, your remote name will be origin but you can name it something else.

That’s Git for non-developers!

Most of what I was doing in Git was pulling/fetching, then pushing. It’s what you will likely be doing as well when helping out in code. There’s a lot of other neat things that Git can do, which includes logging differences, splitting commits, making branches, merging branches, etc etc. But again, this was a crash course and the extra stuff is something a full-time developer would do. 🙂

How I did user research on hitRECord, from user-generated content

2014-10-02T00:00:00Z

Let’s be honest here. “User research” seems like this giant mysterious thing that you can only have if your company has a dedicated UX department with trained UX researchers, and the financial resources to pay users generously for their time in talking with you. If you don’t have that, might as well throw up your hands and call it a lost cause, right? Wrong! There are always ways to find out (at least approximately) who your users are and what they think. It might not be perfect, but seriously, any user research is better than working with nothing. All you need to know, really, is motivation, intent, and context.

I came across such a quandary myself, in my quest to learn more about hitRECord’s active user base. Turns out you don’t have much to offer a stranger when you’re a random person who only has coffee or lunch to offer (and only if they were local to Los Angeles to boot!). But if there’s one thing I pride myself on, it is the ability to Figure Things Out. So I managed to find a way to get the main personas, by using the site itself.

hitRECorders, in their own words (motivation)

For starters, hitRECord.org is an open collaboration production company, combining the efforts of 300,000 artists around the world to make short films, books, music, and more recently, TV shows.

Because it is open and as anonymous as you make it, hitRECorders often share very personal stories on the site, in the form of text, image, video, or music uploads. These are referred to as “RECords.” There were several collections of work (known as “collaborations”) on the site that would allow me to get a better idea of why they participated in the community. It’s only natural that people would want to learn more about each other in a community like that. I went through all the text RECords from three specific collaborations that dealt with these motivations. I gathered quotes about why the artists joined the site and what the hitRECord community meant to them.

The collaborations I used were:

When I was done, I had quotes from 150 hitRECorders, organized in a nice spreadsheet.

What hitRECorders were actually doing on the site (intent)

To determine the user’s intentions on the site, I examined the recent upload history of all 150 hitRECorders in my spreadsheet, noting patterns and assigning values to the general types of work I saw.

“Trailblazer” – mostly spearheads collaborations, expects others to work on them
“Collaborator” – mostly works on active projects, fulfilling specific requests
“Sponge” – mostly contributes to ongoing collaborations, but doesn’t aim for active projects or requests
“Archiver” – mostly uploads own work without paying attention to other collaborations

Recent work of “collaborator” type

What was interesting was that I had a hypothesis of what these personas would be: trailblazer, collaborator, archiver. Gathering the quotes and looking at the uploads actually made me add another – the “sponge,” because it didn’t fit in anything else. It’s very interesting what the data will show you if you let it!

What hitRECorders did off the site (context)

The last part of learning their motivations on the site, was to learn their context. Not all 150 hitRECorders had social media links in their profile, but I found and Googled as many as I could. The aim was learn what their “day job” was in order to determine how hitRECord fit into their life. Again, I assigned what turned out to be 4 values across the board:

Considers hitRECord to be their primary daily activity (including special users known as “curators”)
Has artistically creative job, adds to it with hitRECord work
Has production job in a creative industry, uses hitRECord as artistic outlet
Has completely non-creative job, uses hitRECord as artistic outlet

Personas

After assigning these two values, and noting that there was a general match between the two qualities, I came up with 4 personas:

“Trailblazer” – mostly spearheads artistic direction, expects others to work on them. Primarily staff members, some curators. hitRECord is their primary daily activity.
“Collaborator” – mostly works on active projects, fulfilling specific requests. Likely has production job in a creative industry or has serious artistic hobby, uses hitRECord as artistic outlet.
“Sponge” – mostly contributes to ongoing collaborations, but doesn’t aim for active projects or requests. Often has completely non-creative job, uses hitRECord as artistic outlet
“Archiver” – mostly uploads own work without paying attention to other collaborations.

Using voluntarily-shared content can be fruitful in ascertaining user motivation.

I then analyzed the data to produce percentages of each user “type,” to see which was the predominating persona using the site.

Most users were at the collaborator level.

…which resulted in the findings that I illustrated below.

Four persona types emerged from onsite and offsite research into the community.

So is this enough user research?

Pfft, no, of course it isn’t. I will be the first person to tell you that. What it is is a starting point. It is better than nothing. For example, I can tell you this data has the following limitations right off the bat:

Some hitRECorders may be extremely active, but have not bothered to post anything in those 3 collaborations I was sampling from. I don’t have many of the “curators” (arguably the most active and dedicated non-staff users on the site) at all in my spreadsheet because of this reason. But if I didn’t know their motivations of joining the site to start with, I determined that I wasn’t going to go through with the rest of it. If I were to interview users, I would actually start with the curators, and I didn’t have that chance when gathering whatever quotes I could find.
I didn’t talk to anyone directly when I came up with these personas. (I’ve since started to participate more on the site, which allows me to ideate along with and test with real users.) Sure, listening to what people say instead of observing what they do is still limiting, but at least you get the chance to get deeper into their motivations, intent, and context by simply asking them about it.
I have no clue how each user actually uses the site. This would be the most fascinating thing for me to observe.

But I’d also argue that this approach also has several strengths:

It is fairly cheap, aside from your own labor. You don’t need to pay users, you don’t need to spend 30-60 minutes per user talking to them. I gathered quotes from 150 users in the span of about 6 hours. A while, to be sure, but no way could you get that kind of sample in the same amount of time by talking to each user individually.
You’re guaranteed a variety of users with that sample size. If you only talk to 12 people, you can come up with some rich personas, but how do you know they’re the right mix? With 150, you have more of an idea, even if the sample might still be skewed. Still better than 12, though.

Do what you can! Look at tweets, look at Facebook, look at Yelp. Find where people are talking about your product and stalk them a little. (It’s not creepy if it’s public and for user research, really…)

And honestly, if they are talking about your product and complaining about it, the problem needs to be fixed right away! People only bother to post if it’s a really good experience or a really bad one, so those are the big issues you need to tackle ASAP. So even if you don’t have motivations or intent or context, at least you have that.

Your users are out there, and they are most likely online. Sometimes (usually?) the situation isn’t perfect and you just gotta do the best you can with the resources you have. Learning something about your users is always better than knowing nothing. 🙂

Hyper-us

2014-09-10T00:00:00Z

How many of you have a smartphone? How many of you sleep with it next to your bed at night? Don’t be shy! Pew Research says 44% of smartphone owners have done exactly that. Marketing research has also shown that 75% of smartphone owners use their smartphones in the bathroom. Clearly, we love being connected, all the time. Some of the largest websites in the world now are social media sites – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Our own Toastmasters club uses Facebook and Yelp to spread the word. Clearly, it’s a good thing, right, being connected, checking what your friends are saying and doing and adding your own thoughts and RE-checking what your friends are doing and...

Hold on a second. Let’s take a step back. Social media has gotten SO big, SO fast, that many of us haven’t stopped to consider just what is really going on.

Let me give you some food for thought. Hyper-us, the spread of knowledge on the world wide web.

Have you ever thought about the website addresses that we type in our browsers everyday? HTTP. Hypertext Transfer Protocol. The hypertext there is a computer document that contains links – or hyperlinks – to other documents.

WWW. The world wide web. Now, the internet is not actually the same as the world wide web. The internet is what connects our computers, while the web is the system of connected hypertexts, or in normal vocabulary, websites, that are accessible by the internet.

The inventor of the world wide web is Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Never say that nuclear research wasn’t good for anything!

Frustrated at the inability of CERN scientists to share their knowledge with each other in such a large organization, he wrote a proposal in 1989. He suggested a new kind of information system. And not only at CERN. His vision was, in his words, a “universal linked information system” that allowed for the “creation of new links and new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes universal.”

A year later, in 1990, he had built the first web server, the first web browser, and the first web page.

Now, because only nerds can figure out a text-only DOS interface, the earliest websites were made and used by scientists. That all changed in 1993, when what became Netscape Navigator, was introduced . It was the first browser with a graphical user interface, so anyone could use it.

The Internet Data Corporation reports, in 1994 there were 2,700 websites in the world. 6 years later in 2000, 17 million.

But there was still something missing. In order to be heard on the world wide web, you still had to code or make your own website. The voices there were limited to those who had the knowledge or resources. Others could only read.

Enter, the blog. In 1999, both LiveJournal and Blogger came online. They allowed everyone to put their thoughts online. You didn’t have to know code, you didn’t have to know design, you just wrote, and it was published to the whole world.

In 2003, MySpace changed everything. It’s obvious by its original tagline: A place for friends. You could choose to see only what your friends wrote. It was a way to handle all the online information we were already bombarded with. Facebook did one better in 2004, by inviting only certain college campuses to join. Your social circle there was limited, by design. They eventually opened it up to everyone, in 2006, but the table was already set for social media. What you see on any social media site, essentially only you choose to see.

So what does this all mean? What does it mean, when the largest websites in the world only let you to see what YOU want to see. Sure, there’s universal authorship. But is there truly the universal linked information system, if we aren’t allowed, or don’t allow ourselves, to access all of it?

If you fall down the wrong rabbit hole, it’s as if the world wide web never existed. Instead of expanding our minds, we would be closing it off.

NBC News recently had a piece on an American named Don Morgan, who decided to join the radical Islamic group ISIS in Iraq. He grew up in a regular town just like you or I, but something about radical Islam attracted him, and he found support on Facebook and Twitter. He’d wanted to find information and support from a certain group of people, and found it he did. And it only turned him more hateful.

But that’s a negative extreme. There are plenty of examples of generosity and kindness and knowledge on social media too.

The ALS Ice Bucket challenge morphed from drinking game and cold water dive dares into a viral sensation this summer. It raised twice as much money for ALS in one month than the entirely of last year , and it has undoubtedly brought more awareness to the rare disease. There has been 100x more page views on the ALS Wikipedia page since the Challenge started. People are allowing themselves to learn more about the world around them. All thanks to social media.

But our experience on social media, all depends on who we let in as our friends. We all have a choice.

The world wide web is all about us now. Hyper-us. And it is also up to us to choose how we use it and how we let it change us.

This was originally a speech I gave at Crown City Toastmasters.

How to implement parallax scrolling with the featured image in WordPress Genesis

2014-09-08T00:00:00Z

If you’re just here for the code, go to the project on GitHub!

This is a solution I made while working on the Flying Eyes site – check that out as a demo of this solution.

Since I like making things easier to use for everybody, including clients, I figured it would be a great idea to be able to change the background image for parallax scrolling in the WordPress dashboard. Normally, you’d have have fiddle with the CSS file every time, which is obviously no good for clients, or your general workflow! Unfortunately, there seemed to be no plugins or other solutions that could make this happen in a simple and clean way, so I combined a few ideas to make this solution.

Inspired by WevoStudio’s tutorial for parallax scrolling implementation for WordPress, I improved it by making it super-easy to use. Literally, just set a featured image for any page or post, and let ‘er rip!

This solution is specifically for WordPress Genesis, but you could easily modify it for any template use by inserting the PHP structural directions right after the body tag.

Remember, you should be working on a chid theme with these modifications, otherwise they will be erased when your theme is updated! -sadface-

The JavaScript files

First of all, you’ll need the JavaScript that makes the whole thing possible. I used Ian Lunn’s jQuery Parallax script, which you can find at his GitHub. (I’ve also included it in my project on GitHub.)

You’ll also need a script to tell the page what to do in terms of animation:

<pre class="font:droid-sans-mono lang:js mark:3 decode:true" title="parallaxcall.js">(function($) {
        $(document).ready(function() {
            $('.parallax').parallax('50%', 0.1);
        });
})(jQuery);

The 50% value is the x-position of the image (which you should leave alone), and the 0.1 in this case is the speed at which it will scroll. You can change the speed to your liking.

Put the jQuery Parallax script as well as the parallaxcall.js script into a js folder in your child theme folder. The structure should be child-theme > js.

The PHP (enter all of this in your child theme’s functions.php file)

Now we have to tell WordPress to call the scripts, using the enqueue function like usual:

<pre class="font:droid-sans-mono lang:php decode:true" title="Enqueuing parallax scripts">// Add Parallax script
 function add_parallax_scripts() {
            wp_enqueue_script( 'parallax', get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/js/jquery.parallax-1.1.3.js', array(), '1.1.3', true );
 	    wp_enqueue_script( 'parallaxcall', get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/js/parallaxcall.js', array(), '1', true );
}
 add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'add_parallax_scripts' );

Now here comes the structural directions. The following tells WordPress that if there’s a featured image (i.e. “post_thumbnail”) attached to the post, to assign it the variable $parallaxImage that carries the URL of the image’s large version. (Make sure you get a nice big image for this use!)

It makes a new <div> immediately after the <body> tag, with the class “parallax.” It also places a background image with the right styling, using the value of $parallaxImage, which is the featured image’s URL.

I inserted all of the CSS inline, so it it takes precedence over anything else. You can change the “min-width” to anything you like. “Background-size:cover” (and all the related flavors to cover all browsers) will make sure the image covers the entire browser width, at any size.

If there is no featured image attached to the post, it will insert a <div> with class “top_margin” to give it some space that we can style later, IF you’re using a fixed navigation bar like I was doing. (Otherwise the page content will go underneath the nav bar if I didn’t have that there.) If you don’t have a fixed navigation bar, you can take that off.

<pre class="lang:default mark:7 decode:true " title="Parallax scrolling structural directions">// Adds parallax to all featured images, adds top margin if there is no featured image
	add_action ('genesis_before','use_parallax');
	function use_parallax() { 
		if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) {
			$parallaxImage = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id( $post->ID ), 'large'); 
		?>
			<div class="parallax" id="section_<?php echo the_ID(); ?>" style="background: url('<?php echo $parallaxImage[0]; ?>') no-repeat fixed; min-height:700px; background-size:cover; -webkit-background-size: cover; -moz-background-size: cover; -o-background-size: cover; background-color: #000;"></div>
              	  <?
              	 }
              	else {
	          		echo '<div class="top_margin">&nbsp;</div>';
	          		}
		
		}

Also, I was also using WooCommerce, which uses the featured image as its main product image. No parallax scrolling wanted there! You can use this conditional immediately after the function use_parallax() { line if that’s the case. Make it line 4 in the previous example. And don’t forget the additional right brace at the end of the entire thing if you use this conditional!

<pre class="lang:php decode:true " title="Conditional rejecting WooCommerce products">if ( !is_post_type ('product')) {

Next, we can’t ignore the post titles! Usually for a featured image, the entry title is also styled differently, and this is what the next PHP snippet will do for you. For the Flying Eyes site, I had the headline scrolling normally, in the middle of the image off to the left. This has to be styled different for posts without a featured image, otherwise the design becomes a mess.

Basically, it adds a class of “parallax-page” to the <body> tag if there is a featured image attached to the post, and a blank class if not. By using CSS, I can select the entry title of only pages with a body class of “parallax-page” later.

<pre class="lang:php decode:true " title="Title styling if parallax">// * Add custom body class to the head if page has post thumbnail to customize entry title styling
add_filter( 'body_class', 'parallax_body_class' );
function parallax_body_class( $classes ) {
	if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) {
		$classes[] = 'parallax-page';
	}
	else {
		$classes[] = '';
	}
		return $classes;
}

The CSS (enter all of this in your child theme’s style.css file)

Now, for the styling of the parts surrounding your parallax div.

If you have a fixed navigation bar for the primary menu, add some margin to the top of the content so it doesn’t slide under when there’s no featured image:

<pre class="lang:css mark:2 decode:true " title="Adds top margin for posts without featured image">.top_margin {
	margin-top: 7rem;
}

Again, you can change the value of the margin to your liking.

Next is the styling of the titles of these special pages. You can change any of these values as you see fit.

<pre class="lang:css decode:true " title="Styling the titles of the parallax scrolling posts">.parallax-page .entry-title {
	position:absolute;
	top:15rem;
	left:5rem;
	background-color: #fff;
	background-color:rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7);
	padding:10px 0;
	padding:1rem 0;
	width:40%;
	text-align: center;
}

With WooCommerce, we turned off parallax scrolling, so we sure want to turn off any parallax-related title styling too! The most important part is the positioning.

<pre class="lang:css mark:3-5 decode:true" title="Turn off parallax headline style for WooCommerce">/* Disables parallax headline style for WooCommerce product pages */
.parallax-page .woocommerce div.product .product_title, .woocommerce #content div.product .product_title, .woocommerce-page div.product .product_title, .woocommerce-page #content div.product .product_title {
	position:relative!important;
	top:0!important;
	left:0!important;
	clear:none;
	margin-bottom:1rem;
	padding:0;
	width:auto;
	text-align: left;
}

I know, all those !importants are really annoying, but you gotta override the WooCommerce styling!

Don’t forget the media queries to make your parallax section nice and responsive.

<pre class="lang:css decode:true" title="Media Queries to make your parallax section responsive">@media only screen and (max-width:767px) {  
	 .parallax {
	 	height: 500px;
	}

	.parallax-page .entry-title {
		width:100%;
		top:10rem;
		left:0;
	}
}

Change any of the values as you like, but I found this worked great for me.

Ta da!

And that’s it! Now you can set any featured image to be the background for your awesome parallax scrolling page!

Why rejection was the best thing that ever happened to me

2014-09-06T00:00:00Z

Okay, that’s kind of a lie. Rejection does suck on some level, always. But since it’s already happened to you and life is short, might as well learn from it, that’s my motto! Learn how to approach the situation differently, learn the situations to avoid, and maybe even let it shift your worldview a little.

I had cold-emailed a developer, offering my skills to his company on a contract basis since I sensed they needed UX help. (I have reasons for using that approach, which I will not go into, besides to say “Always do your research!”) I managed to meet the awesome dev team, and it was looking pretty good.

In the end, the answer was no. But it was the words that they used, that shifted my entire approach about my own work.

They said, essentially, that given the company’s current situation, it would “not be productive” to have me on board doing UX work.

Now, they might have been trying to be overly nice about rejecting me, but the phrase “not productive” turned on a light instead. (Call me an optimist!)

They didn’t want to waste my time. They respected my work and the effort I put into my work, and they didn’t want to waste my time doing work that would never be used.

Now, I have no illusions that the road for someone transitioning to a completely different industry is a hard one. Especially when you feel like you’re starting from nothing and have to claw your way up the ladder. I have no experience working with big name companies, I don’t know if my work is “good” according to whoever gets to decide these things. But to hear it from someone else, that my work is too good to waste, was a revelation.

I don’t think that’s the same as earning your keep. You still need to put in your best, and be able to acknowledge that your work can be better and be open to critiques and improvements. But what it means is to not allow anyone to have you do useless things just to keep you busy. You are worth more than just a warm butt in a seat, whittling away the hours on something that will never be acknowledged.

All in all, I don’t regret it. I went as far as I could, given the circumstances. I made a few good contacts, and I have a voice on my shoulder now. One that tells me to respect my work, to respect my skills, and to respect myself. It is too good to waste.

So I keep looking. But I have that voice, and it tells me, “That job doesn’t sound like your work would be appreciated, move on.” I was given a gift when I was rejected because my work wouldn’t be used. I’d better not throw the opportunity away.

On being a freakin’ unicorn

2014-02-24T00:00:00Z

I found out recently that I’m a “freakin’ unicorn.” A TEDx speaker had described herself as one, and I realized I was part of her esteemed group. 1% of the population stutters. 80% of that 1% are men. I’m a stutterer, and I’m a woman. Yup, I’m a “freakin’ unicorn.”

It always surprises me when people say, “Wow, when I first met you, I had no idea you stuttered.” Being a stutterer is so ingrained in me, that it’s impossible to get away from. It makes sense that some treat themselves by becoming actors, like James Earl Jones, Marilyn Monroe, Bruce Willis, and Emily Blunt. They had to play people who were not themselves.

Others treat themselves through brute force. Vice President Joe Biden recited poetry in front of a mirror for hours as a boy. Winston Churchill and King George the 6th would practice rousing speeches, planning out every pause, until as Churchill said, “My impediment is no hindrance.”

Clearly, some very famous people long ago stuttered. Have we come any closer to a cause or cure? Well, we have certainly tried to find both. European treatments in the 1800s involved cutting the tongue, or muscles in the neck. Those practices went out of favor, because patients sometimes bled to death, or kept stuttering. Modern brain scans show that there are physical differences between people who stutter and people who don’t. There is increased activity in the region that controls emotions, and decreased activity in the region that connects speech planning with speech motor control. That makes sense to me, since when I talk, it often feels like it’s not coming from me. The words form in my brain and I can hear them aloud in there, but there’s this distance between that and what comes out of my mouth.

Stuttering is also partly genetic. My father used to stutter, but like King George and Winston Churchill, he treated it by giving rousing speeches. Try asking him for directions, it’s fun!

My personality also had to be a factor. My fearless sister doesn’t have problems speaking in front of hundreds. But I was her complete opposite as a kid. I worried too much about what people thought of me. I was a perfectionist, and the pressure only made it worse. I only spoke when I had to. I was too afraid to ask salespeople for help, or to ask people where the bathroom was.

I was afraid that people would think of me as stupid or incapable. I knew I wasn’t stupid, but at the very least, I thought I was incapable of presenting my ideas. After I struggled mightily through a Spanish presentation, (because English is hard enough, let alone a foreign language!) my teacher referred me to the school’s speech therapist, who referred me to the McGuire Programme. It’s a 4-day program for stutterers by stutterers, and uses the basics of opera singing to control our breathing. Taking purposeful breaths mimics singing, and curiously enough, we don’t stutter when we sing. It was the first time in my life that I was fluent, and that was an amazing feeling.

But I’m not cured. Stuttering doesn’t have a cure, although I can detect patterns. I KNOW I’m physically capable of fluency, thanks to the McGuire Programme – it’s now figuring out the mental environment that makes it happen.

When I’m relaxed or tired, I’m better. Muscles tense up when I’m anxious. Being put on the spot can be good or bad. Sometimes I have no expectation over what comes out of my mouth, and that’s good. When I’m expected to make sense…very very bad!

I worry more about how uncomfortable I’m making people rather than how I’m coming off. If I sense I’m making someone uncomfortable, I put more pressure on myself to fix my speech, and of course, that makes it worse. Even if you have to fake it, smile at me. It helps! 🙂

I know these things about myself, so it’s manageable. But most importantly, I’ve learned that it doesn’t say anything about my intelligence or capability. I still have something to say, even if my ability to say it isn’t the greatest. Stuttering is something that I do, but it doesn’t DEFINE me. I’ve learned to trust that the world will see me as a smart, capable person, and look beyond my impediment.

Another thing is that I don’t assume everyone has it so great. It goes back to what people tell me: “I didn’t know you stuttered when I met you.” You can’t tell by looking at me. You can’t tell looking at anyone, what they’ve struggled with, or what they’re struggling with now. It makes it easier to reach over and say, “Whatever is making you hurt, I’ve felt it too.”

I was at a conference last year, and met an older gentleman at a booth. I knew he’d had a stutter. He tensed up as he stumbled over some words, but you could barely tell. I asked him something, and I must have stuttered, I don’t even remember. He took my hand, and confirmed that he stuttered too, and it had been so hard for him growing up. Companies assumed people like us were a liability. They wouldn’t hire us. One time, he told me, a young salesman pitched his group and stuttered very badly. He called off the meeting for 5 minutes, told the young man that he stuttered too, and to take a breather and get a drink of water. The meeting reconvened and the young salesman did much better.

Now, telling a stutterer to relax usually doesn’t help. But knowing that there was someone there who understood – that helps, a lot. Reaching across to take their hand. “It’s okay, I’ve been there too.” We’re a tiny community, but our lessons can extend to our much larger world. Then maybe we aren’t such mythical unicorns after all.

This was originally a speech I gave at Crown City Toastmasters.

When things work, until they don’t

2013-11-08T00:00:00Z

So I quit my job a little more than a month ago. I did cancer research, and I decided to go into user experience design. A number of people, when I told them, kind of scoffed at the idea and probably thought that I had to turn in my hippie idealist card. Design? Isn’t that just making something pretty? How is that going to help people, besides making Apple fans even more insufferable?

There’s actually way more to design than that. But the hard part is, good design is invisible. It just works, and you forget about it 10 seconds later, going on with the rest of your day. But bad design can frustrate you, it can stop you from doing something that you NEED to do, and it can even be deadly.

So what is design? Wikipedia has a fairly straightforward definition, which I will paraphrase: it is a plan for someone to achieve a unique expectation, that considers context, cost, environment, and safety. So far, already beyond making something pretty! What I’m interested in, is the human aspect. How to design something to be easier to use.

Let’s take a door. People can look at a door and know, right away, what makes a door a door instead of a window or an opening for a car or a giant hole in the wall. We walk through countless numbers of doors a day.

How many of you have pushed on a door that could only be pulled? Or walked into a door entirely? How many have blamed yourself for doing that? Guess what? It’s not your fault – it’s the door’s! Or rather, the people who designed that door.

Humans are really good at establishing patterns. You walk through one or two doors of different types, you understand how it’s supposed to work. It’s almost unconscious. But a designer has to know what those patterns are to have it built correctly.

Here’s a list of patterns for doors: You pull to enter, you push to exit. Bar or plate means you push. Handle means you pull. If all else fails, we can see which side the door hinge is on and figure it out from there. It all works…until it doesn’t. Break any of those patterns, and people don’t know what to do with your door.

And for Pete’s sake, don’t make a window the size of a door. I went to a fancy lounge the other day where the bar area was surrounded by door-sized windows. The staff had taped a warning to one such window, on the end, where people had undoubtedly tried to walk through: “Glass door. Be careful!” Gee, thanks, a lounge with a danger of human bird strikes.

Affordances, this has none. Had to follow waiters in and out to be assured of safe passage. pic.twitter.com/ORiMXeH2Qu
— Anita 💪🏻 Cheng (@anitaycheng) November 7, 2013

So walking into a door kinda sucks. But it’s still just an inconvenience. It can get worse. Those of you keeping up with the news for the past week or so will be aware of my next example: healthcare.gov

Countless numbers of people could not use the site, and I’d bet a good number of those people NEEDED to be able to use it. They needed to get health insurance. You just could not get to the website. So what happened?

Well, on the outside, it looks pretty nice. But ah, design also considers how it works on the inside, too. They made one particular critical error in how the whole thing works. It was so fundamental that even I, who’s been in the field for really only a few months, went, “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. I can’t believe this.”

You had to register for an account before you could browse plans.

First of all, would you shop at any store in the first place if they required you to leave an ID at the door? What would happen if say, Walmart tried to pull that off on Black Friday? That was the same thing.

Sure, it’s the internet, but people still don’t like giving you personal information before they absolutely need to, and bottlenecks can still happen. We don’t expect them to happen anymore because of all the huge popular website we use that DO work. Again, it works….until it doesn’t. Time will tell if they’ll be able to fix everything in time but…mmmm, we’ll see. [Note from 2015: Turns out they did all right!]

Healthcare.gov is something that is clearly someone else’s fault, but going back to the door example, there are other design issues that are often thought of as “our fault” that can be much more serious than walking into a door.

Most accidents today are chalked up to human error. “Oh, if so-and-so had just done this right, this wouldn’t have happened.” And so we go on with our lives, proud of ourselves that of course we wouldn’t make that same mistake. We’re not stupid.

Not so fast. Air France Flight 447 fell out of the sky over the Atlantic back in 2009. The Airbus involved had all the fancy gadgets that was supposed to make flying easier and safer. It worked…until it didn’t. The sensors iced over and the plane took itself out of autopilot, which it was supposed to do, but the pilots didn’t know which sensors were accurate and which ones weren’t.

Ultimately, it WAS human error that took the plane down – one of the pilots kept the plane climbing, which put it into an irreversible stall. But…only one of the pilots made that mistake. There were 2 other more experienced pilots with him. Why didn’t they stop him? They did not know what he was doing. The first pilot had kept his stick locked to a climbing angle, and in Airbuses, the two pilot sticks don’t physically match each other. In Boeing planes, they do. You can tell exactly what your copilot is doing in a Boeing, but not an Airbus.

Yes, there were other things they could have done to ultimately prevent it, but why burden pilots with more training for something that is ultimately a design flaw?

I don’t think we should just accept this. I don’t think that we should put all the responsibility on the user. Just what is the point of getting all this knowledge and developing all this technology if we can’t help each other be better?

So I encourage you all to design. Make something better. Not just pretty, but work better for you. Maybe you won’t get to design something as serious as an airplane, but we can plant the seed. And together, we can all get past accepting that things will work, until they don’t.

This was a originally a speech I gave at Crown City Toastmasters

Anita Cheng

Farewell 18F

Code for America Summit 2024, Day 2

How cities around the world are scaling digital transformation (main stage)

Automating access: Better government services for all (main stage)

Procurement for the people (main stage)

Public benefits for the public benefit—Fulfilling the promise together (main stage)

Making tax filing free and easy with Direct File (main stage)

There’s red tape, and then there’s invisible tape: Identifying hidden barriers to change (breakout)

Bringing digital delivery capacity to federal policy leaders (breakout)

Code for America Summit 2024, Day 1

Why states care more about customer experience than ever before (main stage)

Breaking barriers by building accessible digital services (main stage)

Exploring AI insights across civic tech (main stage)

Human-centered marketing and communication to drive service uptake (main stage)

Kara Swisher receives CfA’s Legacy Achievement Award (main stage)

Fireside chat about AI (main stage)

Making lemonade: When well-intentioned legislation is at odds with user needs (breakout)

Delivering more value by democratizing research with care (breakout)

More than an afterthought: The necessity of training government workers on technology (breakout)

Training survey findings!

Training recommendations

Recommedations for trainers

Baby nap math calculator in Google Sheets

What you need

The calculator

Instructions

Adjusting wake windows

Graduating from doing nap math

Quick thoughts about the fractured UX community

Assigning an active page in Eleventy navigation

The background

The issue

Things I tried

The solution

TWiVTLDR 1066

TWiVTLDR 1064

TWiVTLDR 1062

Jury trial observations

An Event Apart SF 2022

A post-conference reflection

Declarative Design by Jeremy Keith

My AEA SF talk about working collaboratively during COVID

How to Win at ARIA and Influence Web Accessibility by Tolu Adegbite

Navigating challenges in your (fill in the blank) career by Fonz Morris

Q&A

Multilingual design for the web (and beyond) by Preston So

Transform your Meetings into Hybrid Workshops by Erin Casali

Patterns to use in workshops

Async

Sync

Pro-tip: plan but be flexible

Changing the culture around workshops

Designing Better Onboarding with Krystal Higgins

What if People Weren’t the Product? Building a web that loves humanity by David Dylan Thomas

Gratitude

Content design for behavior change

Content design focuses on user needs and tasks

Enter COVID-19

Know what your medium is capable of

Communicate mental models, not just facts

Talk, or at least listen, to the experts

Sweat consistent messaging, not esoteric details

COVID-19 messaging work in San Francisco

Frame everything as a social norm

Teaching how to have safer gatherings during the pandemic

Respect your users

Answer their questions without asking the questions outright

Stay positive, not punitive

Encouraging people to stay home for the holidays

Think about future implications

Introducing vaccines

Be culturally aware and stay flexible

Going further with content design

Websites

Coursera courses

Taking content design center stage in a crisis

Adapting our content design principles for COVID-19

Introducing crisis and emergency risk communications

Crisis communications has special considerations